Articles

• Changing the engine while the aeroplane is still in the air

  Why staying in "doing-mode" leaves us chasing our tails faster, and why deliberately pausing for "thinking-mode" is the only way to actually improve.

• Who will train the next generation of developers?

  With AI tools driving companies to hire only seniors, who will train the juniors who become tomorrow's seniors? The pipeline is hollowing out.

• The delegation imperative: why leaders must let go

  "It's quicker if I just do it myself" is the bottleneck talking — why delegation is a fundamental leadership responsibility, not a luxury.

• Delegation is your responsibility, not a privilege

  Thinking "it will be quicker if I do it myself" is a warning sign that you've become your organisation's biggest bottleneck

• Analysing organisations through metaphor

  Using Gareth Morgan's organisational metaphors — machine, culture, political system — to see a fast-growing startup from different angles.

• Does your organisation have a sprained toe?

  Nicola on how a sprained pinkie toe rippled through her whole body, and what that says about taken-for-granted teams in any organisation.

• What's the ROI on coaching?

  On average companies see ROI of 7x the cost of coaching. It is a high-leverage tool, most effective at leadership levels.

• Beyond artificial deadlines

  Most deadlines exist to signal mistrust rather than to ship work, and arbitrary ones lead to desensitisation and burnout rather than progress.

• No leader is an island

  Why leadership lives in the system, not the individual — and why enrolling people in shared purpose beats granting them empowerment.

• With AI, what should we be focusing on?

  Takeaways from the Yow! Tech Leaders conference on why AI's real productivity gain is modest and why good engineering practices matter more than ever.

• Getting back to work after burnout

  If you’re feeling stressed, you’re not alone. Half of the Australians surveyed were experiencing high levels of stress. And returning to work after burnout requires changes.

• Shifting the blame game: Embracing blameless culture for learning and growth

  Why a blaming culture silences problems and how blameless post-mortems — focused on "why" not "who" — turn failures into learning.

• Standardisation or Innovation?

  Standardise versus innovate isn't a binary — three real-world examples of how teams found the right mix of default stacks and room to experiment.

• The power of self-narratives

  The internal stories we tell about ourselves are interpretations, not facts — recognising that gives us the agency to author new ones.

• Lessons learned from CIA sabotage field manual

  How to combat operational friction brought about by (unintentional) self-sabotage, using insight from a cold war era espionage guide.

• Psychological safety anti-patterns

  Four common ways we can accidentally sabotage our psychological safety efforts, and what to do about it

• Decision-making and leadership

  Why leadership isn't just about how you make decisions — it's about making calls that get buy-in, follow-through, and actually change something.

• What stops us from making change?

  Why knowing what to do isn't the same as doing it, and how reframing new behaviours as experiments helps leaders move past their comfort zone.

• Stop wasting your professional development budget

  Training budgets are going unspent, because staff feel they don't learn anything, and organisations often don't see the benefit. Find out why, what you can do, and build a culture of learning and growth.

• Learning from the discomfort

  Lachlan on ten years of yoga and what "stay in the discomfort" taught him about handling difficult moments off the mat too.

• Overtime is harmful — confirmed by science

  Consistently working more than 40 hours per week is not just hazardous to your health, but can actually make your entire team less productive. Find out why, and get on the path to a better approach.

• The power of personal branding and visibility

  Let's explore the concept of personal branding, its importance, and practical steps to build your unique branding.

• Conflict conversations

  Why tough conversations need more than the right words — understanding the fight/flight/freeze/fawn response is what turns preparation into outcomes.

• Conflict conversations — beyond the words

  Managing conflict is a common everyday situation. Even so, conflicts are hard. As a leader, you’re where the responsibility falls to hold those tough conversations. Whether the impact is day to day, or more significant, you do your best to prepare and aim for the best outcome.

• Role congruity theory of prejudice towards female leaders

  About the challenges women face when striving for promotions and senior leadership roles, gender differences in executive positions, and what can be done about it.

• Signs of a healthy culture

  It’s worthwhile investing effort into your organisational culture, because of the impact it has on the business.

• Blackmill: not just leadership skills

  Why Blackmill's workshops centre on leadership even though the mission is broader — leadership is the cornerstone for tech teams that actually ship.

• Supporting your people leaders

  How to effectively support people leaders at scale

• Onboarding is for promotions too

  Onboarding new leaders is just as important to help them adjust to their new responsibilities and set them up for success

• What's in a name?

  Blackmill's name originated from the White Bay Power Station in Rozelle, which provided power to Sydney for over 66 years.

• Role-modelling the behaviours you wish to see

  Sebastian on a manager who slammed the phone when he admitted a mistake, and the years it took to unlearn the avoidance behaviour that created.

• Lack of adaptation is death

  Why adaptability — short decision cycles, small experiments, fast feedback — is now a stronger competitive advantage than expertise.

• Risk takers

  Reframing "risk-taking" as courage and play, and why creating a safe environment is what allows teams to experiment, learn, and grow.

• Managing up

  Management is a two-way relationship that both the manager and the report should foster and invest in

• Intentional connection

  Why the "free" benefits of an office aren't actually free, and how remote teams can deliberately recreate connection, collaboration, and serendipity.

• Housing First

  The parallel between "Housing First" homelessness programs and psychological safety: people can't tackle anything else until the foundations are solid.

• Lead with authority vs influence

  Know the difference between leading by authority and leading by influence and learn which to use when.

• How can I help you?

  Why "how can I help you?" — borrowed from a TV doctor — is the single question that turns leaders from blockers into multipliers.

• Incrementally Better

  Sebastian on why the urge to "blow it all up and start again" is rarely the right call for organisations any more than it is for software systems.

• Is it people or the systems?

  When something goes wrong it's tempting to blame people, but most of the time it's the system that allowed the mistake — and the system is what to fix.

• Monthly free office hours

  Monthly free product, engineering, or business office hours with Elle and Lachlan

• Fika Time!

  On the Swedish ritual of fika — a designated coffee-and-cake pause — and how an intentional break can strengthen team culture and morale.

• You can’t manage what’s not measured

  Why metrics like DORA and SPACE are only useful if you watch trends over time and then make small, incremental changes.

• Retro time!

  Why running team retrospectives regularly is one of the simplest, highest-leverage rituals for building trust, transparency, and continuous improvement.

• Earn trust and lead inclusively

  A great leader does everything a good leader does and also leads with equity and diversity in mind. The process of earning trust involves a series of conscious investments over time.

• How do we heal polarisation?

  A disagreement in opinions can be a healthy debate. Instead of fearing the differences, we should be curious.

• Think like a scientist

  Why leaders default to preaching, prosecuting, or politicking — and how thinking like a scientist (asking, testing, rethinking) leads to better calls.

• Purposeful drifting

  Sarah on why a year of feeling like she was drifting career-wise turned out to be necessary thinking time before her next deliberate move.

• Where's the fun?

  Why forced fun backfires and what leaders can do instead to let playfulness, flow, and genuine connection emerge in remote teams.

• Self confidence vs self doubt at work

  How frequent feedback and visible vulnerability from leaders helps reports calibrate self-image and counter the inner doubting voice.

• On Imposter Syndrome

  Many people in the dev community experience or have experienced imposter syndrome at some point, including me. Self-doubt keeps us from seeing ourselves as we truly are. However, we can control our perceptions and reframe our thinking.

• What's in a toxic culture?

  A toxic work culture can have profound long term negative impacts on individuals as well as the business. Healthy culture needs work to grow and flourish. It requires clearly defined values, creating a psychologically safe work environment, and implementing sound DEI policies.

• Bad work culture

  Adam Grant's four deadly sins of work culture, and what leaders need to do intentionally so a toxic default doesn't take hold.

• Values alignment

  Why "hire for culture add" beats "hire for culture fit", and how clearly-defined company values make better hires and better decisions.

• Embracing Failure

  Why penalising mistakes breeds risk aversion, and how leaders can build cultures that treat failure as a master teacher rather than a verdict.

• Learning vs education

  Why true learning takes deliberate, effortful, spaced-out practice — and how Blackmill applies these techniques to its workshops.

• Transformational or empowering leadership styles create better leaders in the Internet Age

  Geographically dispersed teams are becoming a necessity as the trend of remote working continues. Leaders need to adapt their approach to take this into account.

• Four Day Work Week

  The growing case for four-day work weeks, with trial results showing higher productivity, better wellbeing, and no drop in output.

• Mindfulness Matters

  How a regular mindfulness practice improves sleep, lowers stress, and helps you stay in flow at work, with practical ways to bring it into a team.

• Mistakes and self-compassion

  Why we offer compassion to others when they slip up but rarely extend it to ourselves, and why self-compassion actually accelerates learning and growth.

• Learning as adults

  Why adults can absolutely keep learning at any age, and how making the experience relevant, autonomous, and fun is what makes it stick.

• Head, Heart, and Hands

  A holistic leadership methodology that combines vision (head), inspiration (heart), and execution (hands) to drive sustained employee engagement.

• Pandemic Burnout

  Why always-on remote work and unequal home loads have made burnout unavoidable, and why leaders should reward outcomes rather than hours.

• Providing valuable feedback

  As a leader, giving feedback is part of your job and doing it well is a skill you need to develop and exercise regularly. We should focus on improving our communication efforts to achieve positive outcomes for all, and on developing a high performance environment where respect for each other is the norm by practising actionable, specific, and kind feedback.

• What leaders can learn from parents

  The parallels between good parenting and transformational leadership, and what business leaders can learn from working mothers in particular.

• What Motivates You?

  Why extrinsic rewards like vouchers and bonuses fade fast, and why intrinsic motivation tied to purpose is what sustains teams long-term.

• Increase your Emotional Intelligence to drive business performance

  The benefits of EI include better team engagement, improved company culture, decrease in employee turnover, and high performance driven results. Here are some suggestions on how to develop and practise emotional intelligence in your organisation.

• Speed vs quality and technical debt

  We cannot have everything we want at once, so how do we reconcile speed of delivery with quality of code?

• Productivity, prioritisation, and progress

  On how to move things forward in a way that works for sustainability and scale

• Effective one:ones

  How to run effective one-ones meetings with your reports

• Mentoring, coaching, and sponsoring

  There are different ways to help our teammates, with each requiring different approaches and a different focus

• Handling difficult conversations and confrontations

  A framework on how to approach difficult conversations and confrontations

• Giving feedback

  Feedback is necessary for learning but it needs to be effective to so as to not threaten relationship and for creating a productive work environment

• Asynchronous work and remote teams

  How to efficiently work with remote teams

• Growing team culture

  Team culture is a living thing. Healthy team culture is difficult and requires active attention and work

• Humour works

  Why humour at work, used thoughtfully and never punching down, builds trust, inclusion, and connection rather than undermining professionalism.

• Growing your leadership style

  Introducing different ways to lead and motivate your team by choosing a leadership style that best addresses the demands of a particular situation. Also suggesting a few things for you to try at home

• Choices

  Why your values matter when choosing where to work, with stories of engineers who discovered too late what their work was being used for.

• Common issues we see tech leaders face

  After decades of working in tech communities while studying and practising leadership, we still don’t have all the answers, but at least we've learned to recognise many of the problems.

• Elle goes editorial

  How distance and anonymity make unkindness easier, and why practising kindness consistently is what builds the resources to call on it when it matters.

• The five levels of pay transparency

  Gender and racial pay gaps are still a common problem in the workplace. Having any structure around salaries is a positive thing, even if it is not all full disclosure.

• The International Day of Women

  Marking International Women's Day with research on invisible domestic work, COVID's disproportionate impact on women, and what organisations can do.

• Why belonging is crucial in team culture and organisational performance

  What does it mean to belong to a group, a team, or an organisation? Belonging is a sense of fitting in or feeling like you are an important member of a group.

• SendGrid on Heroku in 2021

  A quick write up on getting SendGrid to play nicely on Heroku

• Robo-dog vs Robo-unicorn, who will win?!

  Reflections on taking our daughters to Girl Geek Academy and getting more young girls excited about coding.

• Let's focus our attention

  When was the last time you felt absorbed in a task or in a state of flow? These days we all feel busier than ever, but at the same time are much less productive. Instead give yourself more space and time

• Organisational culture to foster creativity and innovation

  Organisations should implement a flatter hierarchy structure, with broadly defined roles, and low power distance culture. Furthermore, organisations should encourage risk tolerance within limitations, psychological safety, availability of resources, flexibility with time, freedom, and autonomy

• Why you should build distributed teams

  There are many benefits to why you should build a distributed team, and with the increasing online tools to enable us to do so, we should embrace the new future of work and increase our overall productivity and happiness

• Hello, 2021!

  Setting the tone for 2021 with a focus on gratitude as a way to support wellbeing through ongoing uncertainty.

• We wrote a newsletter!

  An introduction to Blackmill and what to expect from our monthly newsletter.

• Introducing new services

  We have been working on a few new offerings, which we would like to introduce today. Mainly, we have been working on technical leadership coaching, culture and technical workshops, an Associate Developer onboarding program, and codebase reviews.

• Benefits of workshops

  Workshops provide a fun, interactive, open, and collaborative environment for continuous learning and to meet like minded people.

• Hiring for the Engineering Academy

  The hiring process for Qantas Hotels engineering academy in detail

• So you want to get into web development

  Suggested online resources to check out when starting with web programming

• Start your own apprenticeship program

  Complementary writeup for a talk about how to develop your apprenticeship program

• Blackmill Rebranding

  A rebranding exercise and a reveal of our new logo

• Blackmill Book Club

  Friendly conversations about concepts and topics we are interested in that intersect with our work

• First pilot of an engineering academy notes and after thoughts

  An overview of the Qantas Hotels engineering academy programme