Thinkmill Labs
Open innovation
Creating and open-sourcing tools that advance the future of software design and development.
Our projects
Keystatic
ActiveFirst-class CMS experience, TypeScript API, Markdown & YAML/JSON based, no DB.
Keystone
ActiveThe headless GraphQL API & content studio for schema-driven development.
React Select
Community maintainedThe beautiful and flexible select input built for React.
Classnames
Community maintainedThe JavaScript utility for conditionally joining classNames.
Changesets
Community maintainedA way to manage your versioning and changelogs with a focus on monorepos.
Manypkg
Community maintainedThe linter for package.json files in Yarn, Bolt or pnpm monorepos.
Emery
ActiveTypeScript utilities that improve DX without compromising static types.
Automatic Style Guides
Community maintainedThe one-click plugin to generate a Figma style guide from local styles.
Schema Nodes
ActiveThe FigJam plugin for creating visual representations of GraphQL schema.
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
article
Keystatic now featured in Astro docs
An exciting milestone for our Labs team; Astro has released an official guide to using Keystatic as a CMS to power Astro sites.
·(opens in new window)docs.astro.build
article
7 Things I Love 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.
· 17 min readarticle
Using Keystatic as a CMS
Over the years I’ve experimented with numerous Content Management Systems. I believe Keystatic has the most potential to make blogging stick for developers like myself.
·(opens in new window)lukebennett.com.au
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.
screencast
Integrating 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, the Thinkmill website site leverages the power of two new features recently added to the framework: Markdoc, and Content Collections.
news
How a well thought out design system is turbocharging Keystatic development
The Labs team are making great strides with their new codebase-friendly CMS: Keystatic. Here’s an example of how a good design system can turbocharge front-end development.
Powered by Labs
Labs projects have been a transformative part of the following client success stories:
Atlassian
We helped Atlassian adopt React and build the front-end platform that unifies its products.
Brighte
We helped Brighte create Spark - a new Design System for their Mobile Apps.
Rugby Australia
We helped Rugby Australia rebuild their publishing infrastructure with Keystone to power the content of 3000 websites.
Vocal
We helped Vocal scale from a hunch to a multi-million user publishing platform.
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