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Thinkmill Labs

Open innovation

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

Our projects

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.

Powered by Labs

Labs projects have been a transformative part of the following client success stories:

Atlassian
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Atlassian

We helped Atlassian adopt React and build the front-end platform that unifies its products.

Read the case study
Brighte
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Brighte

We helped Brighte create Spark - a new Design System for their Mobile Apps.

Read the case study
Rugby Australia
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Rugby Australia

We helped Rugby Australia rebuild their publishing infrastructure with Keystone to power the content of 3000 websites.

Read the case study
Vocal
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Vocal

We helped Vocal scale from a hunch to a multi-million user publishing platform.

Read the case study
A photo of Jed Watson & Boris Bozic together

We’d love to work with you

Have a chat with one of our co-founders, Jed or Boris, about how Thinkmill can support your organisation’s software ambitions.

Contact us