Blackmill

We work with early-stage startups and mid-size companies to deliver cultural outcomes that drive business benefits. We do that by teaching, hiring, and leading by example.

Teaching

Customized apprenticeship program

The program is focused on levelling up less experienced developers, allowing intermediate developers to build upon their already strong foundation, and reducing cost of acquisition and churn.

Learn more about our program

Skill and culture workshops

We offer workshops on team communication, workplace culture, and hiring practices. We also offer technical training on topics such as Test-Driven Development in Ruby on Rails, using Git and GitHub for better workflows, and refactoring techniques.

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Hiring

We train on skills like TDD or git , and on cultural skills like communication and hiring. Level-up your engineers, and reduce churn from juniors to senior leaders.

Learn more about team growth

Leading by example

Hire Blackmill to work directly with your engineering and product teams on refactoring. We can role model and mentor while improving code maintainability and delivering features.

See code review and design sprints

Our process

Blackmill is an engineering practice consultancy focused on deliberate development. We believe thoughtful engineering practices lead to quality, stability, and efficiency.

The best way to make software is to constantly seek for new efficiencies, new improvements. There is always room for growth. Blackmill helps you review your engineering practice to identify its key strengths and core weaknesses. We help you learn and grow.

An engineering practice has three major components. People, Philosophy, Processes. These are the meta structures of how a techology organisation does its work. People enact Philosophy via Processes.

Our purpose

Blackmill exists because we believe that software engineering can be done better. Now we're bringing all our experience together under one roof.

Our values

We believe in people, in learning, and in clear and open communication. We do what we love. We make time to do it right.

More about our process

Elle Meredith

Elle is a full stack web developer with more than ten years experience writing Ruby and Rails. Before Blackmill, she was a Development Director in the New York City office of thoughtbot.

Lachlan Hardy

Lachlan is ex-GitHub, ex-Neo, ex-Microsoft, ex-Ninefold, ex-Atlassian, and ex-News. He loves the attention to detail, efficiency, and quality that only a care for your craft can produce.

More about us

Software engineering consultancy