What we give

One of our values is that we involve people we love. To us, this means spending time with our families, and investing in our communities. We participate and contribute where we can, to our communities, to events, and with donations.

Community

Service

As long-time members of the global and Australian Ruby, JavaScript, and web standards communities, we have a long history of participation in those communities. Elle has run multiple Ruby Conferences and Rails Camps, and served as a member of Ruby Australia. Lachlan has also served on the Ruby Australia committee, as Vice-President and as a general member. Together, they ran USA Rails Camp East in 2016.

In 2018, they served as advisors to the organisers of the inaugural Levels Conf. Australia’s first conference dedicated to supporting software developers new to the industry.

In 2020, Elle served as Treasurer of Maribyrnong Kinder .

Pizza

Elle and Lachlan ran pizza-making workshops at Ruby Conf Australia 2019 , Rails Camp South 2019. , and Elixir Camp 2019 . They also cooked homemade pizza for the children and staff at a local daycare centre in Footscray, Melbourne, twice. And host a regular open house pizza event that anyone is welcome to join: Pizza Friday. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Pizza Friday has become a regular virtual event.

Events

Each week, Blackmill hosts a book club to explore with others concepts that intersect with our work. It’s a friendly conversation over lunch about software, leadership, and engineering practices. Everyone is welcome.

You can find notes from our sessions and details of how to join us in the GitHub repo: https://github.com/Blackmill/book-club/

Donations

We state in our values that we share our profits with charities we believe in. We commit 1% of last year's revenue to be distributed on a quarterly basis.

Each member of the team receives $100 to donate via Good Thnx . The remainder of our 1% revenue commitment is distributed quarterly.