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Authors

jed watson avatarjed watson avatar

Jed Watson

Co-founder of Thinkmill and OSS developer. Creator of Keystatic, Keystone, react-select, and classnames.

Specialties

  • Front-end Engineering,
  • DevOps,
  • API Platforms,
  • Content Management Systems,
  • React,
  • GraphQL

Find Jed on

  • GitHub
  • talk

    Meet Keystatic

    Thinkmill founder Jed Watson introduced React Sydney to Keystatic our new file-based content management system that makes Markdown, JSON and YAML content in your codebase editable by humans.

    April 2023
  • article

    The Thinkmill Learning Loop

    How the work we do in open source and client services drives our craft to new levels.

    February 2023·2 min read
  • talk

    Single source of truth development

    Jed demonstrates an end-to-end project using Prisma, Keystone, GraphQL, TypeScript and Next.js where everything is derived from a single source of truth for the schema and types.

    September 2022
  • news

    We’re really proud to see so much adoption of our OSS tools

    Our ability to do great work is inseparable from the communities we’re a part of. Seeing our open-source projects used by so many people remains a constant source of inspiration.

    September 2022
  • screencast

    The State of Headless CMS

    Jed joined a panel of experts to discusses the current state of Headless CMS and what lies over the horizon.

    July 2022
  • talk

    Introducing KeystoneJS, the CMS & API Platform for Prisma

    Jed’s workshop on how to build a polling system into a blog with Keystone, NextJs, GraphQL & Prisma.

    July 2022
  • talk

    Keystone, GraphQL & Prisma

    Jed discusses the new Keystone 6 at Prisma’s Korea Meetup

    October 2021
    Jed Watson presenting on zoom at Prisma Korea meetupJed Watson presenting on zoom at Prisma Korea meetup
  • talk

    Next-gen CMS & GraphQL API with Keystone & Prisma

    Jed shared our freshly minted Keystone 6 with the world at Prisma Day conference in July 2021. His talk is a great way learn how Keystones combination of features and flexibility set it apart from other backend frameworks and Content Management Systems

    July 2021
  • article

    ReactConf AU, one year later

    We put on Australia’s first ever React Conf in February 2020. You won’t believe what happened next!

    February 2021·5 min read
  • talk

    The Value of Open Source

    Jed wraps up ReactConf AU by discussing the sustainability of open source, the value OSS creates for us all individually and as a collective, and then proposes some small steps we can all take to ensure the future of our vibrant community.

    March 2020
  • talk

    Building React Select

    Jed talks about how he accidentally built the most popular React component, experienced death by a hundred props, got buried under hundreds of PRs, invented a component extension API, learned that styles are also a function of state, influenced some major design systems and finally got some sleep.

    October 2019
    poster collage of Jed Watson presenting his talk Building React Selectposter collage of Jed Watson presenting his talk Building React Select
  • talk

    Rebuilding React-Select

    Jed discusses the upcoming React Select 2 and his experiences working in open source.

    March 2018
  • talk

    Content Management & Node.js

    Jed Watson talks about Content Management Systems in Node.js.

    November 2015
  • talk

    Going Mobile with React

    Jed shares what we’ve learned approaching the unique challenges of building mobile web apps with React.

    June 2015
  • article

    Making the case for Progressive Javascript

    I’m crediting Mark Dalgleish for this one, but I want to make the case because it’s the best alternative I’ve heard to “Isomorphic Javascript”.

    February 2015·3 min read
  • article

    My first year of Open Source Commitment and KeystoneJS

    If you want to do something, do it every day. This is the story of my first year writing open-source software.

    September 2014·5 min read

More posts from other Thinkmill voices

  • AI search explained: indexing, retrieval and reranking

    Organisational knowledge is usually spread across a dozen tools, and keyword search only finds results that match exact words. We run text search, embedding search and reranking on the same dataset, and find out how semantic search with a reranker returns the most relevant results for a query.

    October 2026·12 min read
  • Your agent believes that docs folder

    The agent trusted a committed docs folder of generated artefacts over my instructions. I deleted the lot and lost nothing.

    September 2026·8 min read
  • Are your AI agents making progress or producing work?

    We shipped a working MVP for the Tech Council of Australia in two weeks using an agentic development workflow. Along the way, we learned how easily agents can produce convincing work without moving a product forward, and why engineers still need to decide what progress looks like.

    September 2026·5 min read

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