Flickr is a social sharing site for photography which was founded in 2004, and these days people might say that it shares some of its cofounders with Slack, though back when Slack started, everybody said that the company was started by some of the founders of Flickr. That’s because Flickr was arguably the most influential site of the Web 2.0 era, helping define everything from the user interface design to the bright colors to the easy way that developers could access data from the platform. A lot of the things that we take for granted on the modern social internet, like a friendly “voice” used to communicate to users, were pioneered by Flickr, and then quickly came to be considered standard expectations for the apps and sites that followed. It’s hard to imagine that sites from Tumblr to Grindr would have omitted their final “e”s without Flickr’s precedent.

Miranj is very much a product of the same ethos. We may have decided to retain all the vowels in our name, but that spirit of the web we strive to uphold in all the work we do has its roots in the friendly, community-oriented, maker culture that we witnessed during Flickr’s hey-day.

While it is nice to see Flickr back in the zeitgeist of late, it is especially heartening to see them turn their focus towards long-term thinking.

The Flickr team at SmugMug did something special with their responsibility about these public works, due to their cultural significance to the world. They made the Flickr Commons, and brought in a team with expertise in digital archiving and community. This is a project of The Flickr Foundation, designed to preserve digital legacies, and begun in collaboration with no less than the U.S. Library of Congress (back before that was an institution under siege.) They are developing a hundred year plan for how to care for these works, which is virtually unheard-of in the digital world.

Archival and preservation of content is another topic of major interest for us. Websites die for a whole host of reasons. Anil touches upon some of these in his essay:

[…] large institutions, especially ones that have developed complex processes for good reasons, like government agencies and big businesses, often have trouble maintaining public-facing web infrastructure over long timeframes. Running a website that millions of people can access requires constant updates and maintenance, guarding against a never-ending onslaught of security challenges (a task that’s rapidly getting more difficult!), and the internal knowledge on how a site was created in the first place often leaves when employees do.

Businesses grow, restructure, wind up shop. We’ve all probably witnessed sites (including ones we had built) shut down. Good to see an organisation build protections for its content against that eventuality.

The latest iteration of our support packaging is anchored around 3 unique client personas, offering simplicity of choice and several client benefits like—

• Reduced circle of concern (not responsible for servers/application stability)
• Assurance that the best practices are being followed
• Proactive support if something fails/stops working
• Reduced administrative overheads
• Predicable pricing
• Help and guidance, whenever they require
• Knowledge that someone’s got their back

At the same time, these packages have immensely benefited us in our sales, project management, developer efficiency, and most importantly, our business revenue.

This talk takes the audience through our lived experiences, as we transitioned from squarely a maker’s mindset to that of a caregiver’s mindset that empathises with client’s challenges. Drawing from this journey, I explore the whys and hows of packaging support plans and offer insights and guidance on how one might repackage their offerings.

If you’re keen to learn more, don’t hesitate to email hidden; JavaScript is required.

While the tool is not yet publicly available, we have been using it internally and some of the static archives generated by the tool of erstwhile CMS-based sites have been running smoothly in the wild for years.

email hidden; JavaScript is required if you’re interested in archiving a content-heavy site of your own. Always happy to help or exchange ideas around digital archival¹.

The talk covers three broad areas:

• We start by looking at the benefits of leveraging Craft (and Yii) APIs in general and the ways in which that makes us more efficient developers, and our code more reliable and performant.

• Having established the why, we move on to examining commonly occurring scenarios during the development lifecycle and identifying patterns where we can start falling back to and integrating more of the API.

• In the third and final part, we look at ways to identify the appropriate Twig filters and functions, or Craft helpers, services, and components that can be plugged in these scenarios.

Demystifying the Craft API for Twig Developers by Prateek Rungta on Vimeo.

In order to demonstrate some of these more richly with relatable examples, I created a bare-bones site for a fictional Dot All Music Festival. The code for this site is up on GitHub.

Photographs from the event.

This talk is based upon my own developer journey using Craft CMS over the years. I also drew from the experience of witnessing first-hand the individual development journeys of my teammates, and spotting common patterns between their paths and my own.

I hope this helps you discover and use more of the powerful tools available to use inside a Craft CMS Twig template file. email hidden; JavaScript is required if you found any of the techniques useful or discovered something new that you could use.

We were invited to talk about our learnings from optimising and hosting high-traffic sites such as Guiding Tech at the sixth edition of the Bangalore Site Speed Meetup.

Bangalore Site Speed Meetup 6th Event on YouTube.

In this talk we go over caching as a broad performance strategy, before dive into micro-caching as a specific approach to handle loads of 10 to 100 concurrent requests per second. We cover the filter, storage, and invalidation implementations¹ of this caching strategy in Nginx. The talk concludes by comparing metrics of our caching strategy against a target of achieving sub-200ms TTFB response times for all visitors.

This talk is a newer revision of the Fortifying Craft CMS for High Traffic talk from 2019² which, as it says on the tin, was specifically tailored for Craft CMS based workflows. In this edition we focus on just micro-caching as a strategy and look at it independent of any specific CMS running at the application layer.

About Us

Miranj is a strategic web design and development studio. We’ve been in business for over 13 years and have consciously remained a small specialised team with a clear purpose. We are laser-focused on the web — no mobile/native apps, no product design, no digital UI/UX, no trying to imitate a “full-service agency”. We’ve been creating inclusive, accessible, ceaseless, clear, performant, future-friendly websites and with each passing year, we want to keep getting better at our craft.

We work directly with clients (no outsourced assignments or communicating via intermediaries) and offer them a turnkey web solution — strategy, design, development, support, and hosting. We’ve worked in domains such as media & publishing, manufacturing, conferences, recruitment, and even for other design studios. However, what sets us apart is our priority towards projects that are meaningful and serving society. Nearly two-thirds of our work is in the education (e.g. universities, science outreach, etc.) and non-profit (policy & advocacy, health, public interest campaigns, philanthropy, etc.) space.

We’re incorporated in New Delhi but in practice, we’re a fully remote organisation. Our team members are distributed between New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, and Phnom Penh (Cambodia). And we occasionally share our learnings with the web community at conferences around the world.

Our Expectations

As a senior web developer, you should be comfortable with —

• The entire web stack i.e. front-end (HTML/CSS), back-end, writing templates and working with modern JavaScript.
• Taking ownership of project repositories and ensuring stability over release cycles.
• Writing code for different & diverse application frameworks (in PHP / JavaScript etc).
• Ensuring low technical debt by catching and refactoring breaches.
• Creating robust & modular templating architectures.
• Automating processes by leveraging build tools and pipelines.
• Handling, manipulating and migrating data sets between environments.
• Leveraging shell scripts & command-line tools.
• Deploying projects on servers.
• Working with designers & managing developer hand-offs.
• Writing progressively enhanced HTML, CSS, JavaScript and adopting third-party libraries.

We believe the following traits will play nicely —

• You favour a long term relationship over a short stint
• You are eager to take charge and get stuff done
• You are open to learning and can pick up new technologies by reading documentation & tutorials
• You value your commitments
• You are good at communication, including writing
• You appreciate clean, readable code and honour coding style/standards
• You like sharing ideas on how to make work more fun, meaningful and fulfilling
• You believe that an organisation should be run sustainably and with financial prudence

Your Responsibilities

Your work at Miranj will involve —

• Leading web projects and owning client deliverables.
• Understanding key project requirements and architecting robust technical solutions.
• Translating designs into CMS templates, building custom features and plugins that extend CMS functionality.
• Performance optimisation through caching, image optimisation and other strategies.
• Maintaining, supporting, refactoring and upgrading past projects (typically, LAMP stack).
• Collaborating closely with external partners in a project team.

What’s on offer?

• Opportunity to work with modern systems and software, with continuous learning
• Projects that are meaningful and socially-conscious
• Monthly team hangout, which we’re told are fun
• Medical insurance (if you’re based in India)
• A sustainable pace of work (5‑day work week and up to 40 days of paid time off each year)
• A Mac for work use
• Support for speaking at conferences
• A culture that values reason and debate over authority; autonomy over control; slow and considered decision-making over fast and hasty; and a healthy work-life balance
• A healthy compensation, proportionate to the value you can bring to us

How to apply?

Fill out this application form. Make sure you point us to 3 projects that you’re proud of. For each one, mention the project duration, your role, and your contribution. In addition, please share your online presence (such as Twitter/Mastodon, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website/Blog). And oh, do mention your hobbies. We’re curious about what you find interesting outside work.

We do not discriminate based on caste, race, religion, orientation, gender, physical ability, formal education, age, nationality or any such factors. If you belong to any under-represented community we strongly encourage you to send in your application.

If you know a suitable candidate for this opening, kindly refer them to us. If the endorsed candidate is a successful hire (retained post-3-month probationary period), we’ll be happy to share a referral fee of ₹50,000/- for your gesture.

Aside from using Craft to power our projects, Miranj has also released a few utilitarian Craft plugins over the years. We were quick to update most of them with Craft 5 support immediately after the public release, and we have finally gotten around to updating the last (and most complex) plugin as well:

• Contact Form Tuner
• Cryptographer
• Obfuscator
• Router
• Sheets to Tables

In addition to these plugins, we also maintain a public Craft CMS starter project which has also been upgraded with Craft 5 support. Hope you find these useful!