Thinkmill Labs

Open innovation

Creating and open-sourcing tools that advance the future of software design and development.

Our projects

Keystatic
Active
First-class CMS experience, TypeScript API, Markdown & YAML/JSON based, no DB.
Website (opens in new window)Twitter (opens in new window)Mastodon (opens in new window)
Keystone
Active
The headless GraphQL API & content studio for schema-driven development.
Website (opens in new window)Twitter (opens in new window)Slack (opens in new window)
React Select
Community maintained
The beautiful and flexible select input built for React.
Website (opens in new window)
Classnames
Community maintained
The JavaScript utility for conditionally joining classNames.
Changesets
Community maintained
A way to manage your versioning and changelogs with a focus on monorepos.
Manypkg
Community maintained
The linter for package.json files in Yarn, Bolt or pnpm monorepos.
Emery
Active
TypeScript utilities that improve DX without compromising static types.
Automatic Style Guides
Community maintained
The one-click plugin to generate a Figma style guide from local styles.
Website (opens in new window)Tutorial (opens in new window)
Schema Nodes
Active
The FigJam plugin for creating visual representations of GraphQL schema.
Website (opens in new window)

Why we experiment

Thinkmill’s mission is to develop, champion, and share ever-better tools, methods, and practices for making great software products, by doing so for our valued clients. We do this by open-sourcing our work, and by sharing the best tools, mindsets, and practices in the industry. We’ve been living this mission since we launched Keystone in 2013. Today, we have a team of engineers and designers working across a range of R&D projects. We call this team Thinkmill Labs; and it’s where our experimentation plays out daily.

By giving our Labs team the freedom to experiment, be curious, and take smart risks, we explore the real-world challenges that our clients face. We translate our findings into tools and practices that benefit our clients, without exposing them to unnecessary risk.

Labs is an essential part of our learning loop, which keeps us at the bleeding edge of our craft while supporting our ability to deliver best-in-class product design, design systems, and more.

Labs is not an island. Our work stands on the shoulders of the broader Thinkmill family, and others in open source. In this spirit, we share what we make and learn, so that others too can grow and benefit.

What’s new in Labs

Aug 22nd, 2023
Keystatic now featured in Astro docs(opens in new window) . An exciting milestone for our Labs team; Astro has released an official guide to using Keystatic as a CMS to power Astro sites.
Jun 23rd, 2023
7 Things I ❤️ About Keystatic — A Thread 🧵👇.After using Keystatic full-time for about 5 months, I thought I'd share some of the things I really like about it. The talk was at the SydJS meetup, held on the 21st of June 2023 at the Atlassian HQ.
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Apr 2nd, 2023
Using Keystatic with Astro’s Content Collections.Simon has a new video walking you through the process of implementing Keystatic to power parts of the site you’re on right now! Built with Astro, this site leverages the power of two new features recently added to the framework: Markdoc, and Content Collections.Watch(opens in new window)
Feb 28th, 2023
Serverless website & booking system with Keystone, Planetscale, Vercel, & Next.js.Josh Calder has open-sourced a new website he built for his wife’s performing arts business. It lets students view a timetable, check fees, find available lesson times, and enrol through a portal. It combines Planetscale and Vercel to make for a fully “serverless” Keystone stack.Watch(opens in new window)
Feb 20th, 2023
Keystatic’s now on Twitter 🐦. Follow along to stay connected to the latest news. Tweet (opens in new window)
Feb 19th, 2023
Livestream: landing page with Keystatic, Tailwind, and Next.js.We’re working on a few Keystatic starter templates for devs interested in early access. Watch Simon livestream the build of our first example – a marketing website landing page.Watch(opens in new window)
Feb 10th, 2023
Our new database-free CMS experiment is up on GitHub.While it’s still early days for this project, you can now take "Keystatic" (working title) for a test drive. For more info checkout the README.