Hello and welcome to the first edition of the Thinkmill newsletter!
It’s taken us a minute to get this first edition out. If you don’t recall where or why you signed up, we’re Thinkmill – an Australian engineering and design consultancy with a love for open source.
What you can expect from this newsletter:
- A new edition every 1-2 months.
- News related to our commercial projects, method for product development, and activities in the tech and OSS community.
- Curated links from across the product, design and engineering internet.
Without further ado, here’s the first edition…
Thinkmill news
Project highlights
The last few months have seen us engaging with clients across a range of sectors. Demand for Design Systems remains high, and we’ve also been busy building prototypes and proof-of-concepts for new and returning clients. With the Olympics now in full swing, we’re grateful to have made meaningful contributions to the Australian Sports Commission (team augmentation services), and AusCycling (new multi-site publishing platform), who play vital roles supporting sport development down under.
Gathering
Last month we held our first IRL get-together in a while. Spanning two days, The Thinkmill Gathering coalesced our design and dev diaspora from as far afield as WA and New Zealand. We spent a day in Sydney sharing learnings and mining the Thinkmill brainstrust for novel ways of solving tricky design/tech problems. The next day we escaped to the Blue Mountains for fresh air, hikes, boardgames, and karaoke! Having pivoted to remote-first in the early days of the pandemic, we consider ourselves reasonably adept at sustaining a healthy company and culture in a decentralised way. With that being said, face to face collaboration and knowledge sharing remains an invaluable part of life at Thinkmill.
Conferences & Meetups
Simon Vrachliotis flew to the USA to talk about unleashing designers using Tailwind at Epic Web Conf 2024.
Closer to home, Luke Bennett spoke at SydJS about what he learned when applying Tailwind to a multi-brand design system. You can watch the talk here or follow along with the article version which has code snippets included.
Open Source
Keystatic has released some quality-of-life improvements: an inline option for markdoc and mdx fields which enables the storing of multiple rich text fields in a single file, and a new ignore field which lets you preserve a field written in content without showing or editing it in the UI.
Keystone made it into the top 15 of the Backend Frameworks category in the most recent State of JS Survey. It’s always great so see our tools being appreciated by others.
Curated links
Smashing Tools. Made with Keystatic, smashing tools is an open source collection of starter kits, UI components, design resources, and AI tools to help devs start new projects quickly.
The Valley of Code. Developer and superblogger Flavio Copes has made a manual for all things web dev. If you know somebody who is starting out, this is a handy resource takes you from first principles of programming through to networking, deployments, and beyond.
The Magic of Clip Path. If you’ve ever stumbled upon clip-path in your CSS styling travels, and aren’t quite sure of it’s utility, Emil Kowalski’s interactive deep dive covers all the basics and more.
Public Work. Cosmos (a Pinterest alternative for creatives) made this neat little side project that lets you explore 100,000+ copyright-free public domain images from many of the world’s great digital archives. Checkout these gorgeous public domain moon pics.
The AI Summer. Benedict Evans’ review of the current state of AI adoption. If you’re looking for a sober read that transcends a lot of the hype and grift, this one might be for you.
On one hand, getting a quarter to a third of the developed world’s population to try a new product in 18 months is very hard. But on the other, most people who tried it didn’t see how it was useful. Of course, there’s a selection bias here: if you’ve bought a $650 smartphone, you’ve already decided that it’s useful, and you’re a lot less likely to abandon it than a website that you spent 5 minutes playing with. And you could also point out that the best versions of the models are often behind paywalls. But if this is the amazing magical thing that will change everything, why do most people say, in effect, ‘very clever, but not for me’ and wander off, with a shrug?
The Boring Product Manifesto. Renowned product + process pontificator John Cutler’ somewhat tongue-in-cheek riposte to the ZIRP-era notion that every product and product team needs to transform the world:
I’m talking about the good kind of boring, where most of your brain power goes to your work. You don’t need to be a combination of Oprah Winfrey, Stanley McChrystal, an F1 driver, Indra Nooyi, the Dali Lama, and Marcus Aurelius to turn some code into something someone will pay for and enjoy.
While we’re far from shy when it comes to ambitious projects and digital transformations, John’s manifesto offers a timely reminder of the inherent value that lies in espousing steady and sustainable work practices.
Until next time 👋
