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As another financial year comes to a close¹, the accountants draw out a projection of our profits and a corpus is carved out to give back some of our earnings to the community. Each member of the team has a chance to suggest and campaign for organisations working on:

1. Issues that impact our work.
2. Issues that impact our industry.
3. Issues that impact our society.

The corpus is then split equally between one organisation each from the above three groups. We prefer finding new recipients each year and try to have a gap of at least three years before donating to a previous recipient.

This year we ended up donating to:

• PhotoSwipe, for enabling buttery smooth click-to-zoom ​“lightbox” experiences on photos and images.
• The Internet Archive, for continuing to preserve this invaluable community resource that is the world wide web.
• Tarun Bharat Sangh, for conserving water — that precious life-enabling resource which we often take for granted.

This is our fifth year² of giving back, and we continue talking about this publicly in the hope that it encourages others to do the same, like it once encouraged us.

It was probably sometime in the late 2000s that I first came across the idea of an organisation pledging to donate a percentage of their profits to charity. I cannot recall exactly where I first read about this practise but it was probably on one of the early web 2.0 gang members’ projects. The idea seemed so novel at the time, yet also felt right, and I made a mental note to do the same if I ever when I ran my own shop.

Fast forward a few years, I was co-running my own shop, booking some profits, making an odd donation or two, but not really following the principle that had inspired me back then.

That finally changed in 2020. A lot of things got upended in that First Year of Covid™, but new practises also emerged as a result. We deliberated, sought opinions from the team, and put in place a process to make annual donations to three types of causes. Our pool is split three ways between:

1. Issues that impact our work.
2. Issues that impact our industry.
3. Issues that impact our society.

This is the fourth time we’re following through and giving back a percentage of our profits. This year we donated to:

• Prettier, for keeping our code consistent and saving countless trivial formatting and style-guide reviews.
• Electronic Frontier Foundation, for continuing to fight for digital rights.
• Wikipedia, for documenting so much of the universe, and showing the best of the power of the web.

Just like the first three times¹, we are talking about this publicly in the hope that it encourages others, like it once encouraged us. Please join our efforts by amplifying the contributions to these organisations and projects.

We make no secret of our love for Craft CMS here at Miranj. While we rarely prize a tool or tech over the problem it helps us solve, we greatly value the efficiency of a good tool, and Craft CMS continues to shine on that front. One such aspect is the ease with which one can tap into and extend the core functionality of the CMS. There’s a thriving community of plugins that enhance, boost, and add to the already elaborate set of core features offered by Craft. While we depend on a fair few of them for most of our projects, we have also released some plugins of our own:

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

And as of this week, all five of our plugins have been updated to work with the latest release of Craft 4. Some of these plugins (Router, Obfuscator and Cryptographer) date back all the way to 2015 and Craft 2, and we are glad to continue supporting them and making them available for the community to use on their projects as well.

Hello again! Hope you’re having a pleasant day.

When we last wrote to you, we were wondering if the pandemic would cause havoc every six months. While the virus is receding in strength, there have been other global concerns and we are feeling the heat of the economy we live in. We wonder what settling down might mean. Should we be cautious in our optimism?

However, not all is gloomy on our end! Luckily for us, we’ve been having some fun, and have been caught up with interesting work (something we are always grateful for). Here are some things afoot with our team.

1. 🥳 All of us met for the first time in the month of April. Paul flew in from Cambodia after two years of working with us remotely. We spent a week together in Delhi working, eating excellent meals and enjoying some escape-room games. Having worked from our homes for several months, this change was a breath of fresh air.

2. ✈️ We then headed to Udaipur for a retreat, taking a step back from everyday tasks to enjoying the beautiful landscape. We had a chance to discuss our thoughts, hopes and plans for Miranj. We went on to share the same Covid strain 🦠 as proof of our team bonding 😂.

3. 🛵 New work: Take a look at the Webflow-based brand-reveal site for River, a Bengaluru-based startup building a stylish, multi-function electric two-wheeler for the Indian market. We worked with Hamsa and KL11 to bring this site to life. It was exciting to participate in the early stages of an automobile start-up, especially one working on an electric vehicle. We look forward to riding the scooter when it’s out!

4. 🕊️ In 2022, continuing with our efforts to give back, we’ve channelled our donations to:

   • Homebrew, which installs ​“the stuff you need that Apple (or your Linux system) didn’t.”
   • SFLC, which works on defending our digital freedoms and rights.
   • Magic Bus, which equips children aged 12 – 18 in India to learn the skills they need in order to move out of poverty.

5. 🗓️ Ever since we went remote-only, we’ve looked for ways to make our internal team meetings more focused and meaningful. The latest in our arsenal is a weekly Stand Up Pro Max (a play on the practice of daily stand-ups). Here, each of us shares our weekly accomplishments and work. It helps all of us stay on top of our craft (😉) as a team, and we get a window into the details of others’ work that we might otherwise miss.

6. ✨ Craft 4 is out! And we’ve updated four of our free Craft CMS plugins to support Craft 4. Our most complex plugin Router is the only one yet to support Craft 4, but we’ve now added multi-item Categories, Entries and URIs filters to the Router plugin in the latest 1.2.0 release.

7. 📃 Our Craft project boilerplate has seen some new documentation and explainers. Take a look at the detailed documentation of our image component and the explainer on our JSON-LD Schema architecture.

8. 🤝 If you’ve enjoyed our free Craft plugins or other community contributions (such as project boilerplate, talks, slides, etc), you can now sponsor us on GitHub! Buy us a monthly beer 🍺, lunch or buffet 🍲. One-time sponsorships are also welcome!

9. 💜 Here’s some stuff that we’d love for you to explore:

   • “Lines of CSS” slider
   • “The least website possible”
   • What is the best way to mark up an exclusive button group?

10. 🏙️ We have a presence in Bengaluru now! Prateek has moved to the Garden City and can be lured far and wide, through traffic and rain, with the promise of good idli or dosay.

11. 🖋️ And the most important update: Please welcome Kavya Murthy — our latest team member who we met over work on the Azim Premji University website. Kavya is a writer and editor based in Mysore and our new Content Strategist. Having built extensive content-based websites for over a decade, we’re excited to explore content in a deeper way with Kavya’s addition to the team.

🎙️ Tune In

Last year, Tejas (from 3 Sided Coin) and Souvik started Two Studio Heads Walk Into a Bar, a space to discuss the business side of small creative service agencies.

In a brand new season, Two Studio Heads is being released on YouTube and your favourite podcast service. Catch the first episode of this season where Tejas and Souvik discuss Branding and Positioning Your Studio with brand strategist, serial entrepreneur and the founder of The Hard Copy – Meeta Malhotra.

Subscribe to the show on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts. If you’d like to chat with Tejas/​Souvik in a future episode (or have some topic suggestions), please reach out to them on Twitter at @twostudioheads.

🤙 Let’s Talk

We’re on the lookout for interesting web projects and collaborations for the next quarter. Do email hidden; JavaScript is required if you (or anyone around) would like help/​guidance on web strategy or development.

We’re also trying to shape our content services to make them meaningful and impactful for clients. If you’ve been facing any content challenges, let’s get on a call.

Do write to us with your plans for the rest of the year. We hope the remainder of 2022 is free of crisis, and we can bid adieu to the anxiety that has taken so much of our past two years.

Leaving you with glimpses into life at Miranj. It always involves food and drinks! 🍻

At Rustom’s in Delhi, April 2022, waiting for food. L‑R: Divya, Anita, Prateek, Souvik and Paul. 

Our team of 6! Top L‑R: Divya, Kavya, Prateek. Bottom L‑R: Paul, Anita and Souvik. 

Stay safe, of course, and have a wonderful rest-of-2022!

– From all of us at Miranj
Miranj is Anita, Divya, Kavya, Paul, Prateek, and Souvik.

Hello! Happy February.

We sent out our first newsletter in Feb 2020, and have been following a half-yearly cadence ever since. The pandemic too seems to have latched on to the same cadence and is causing waves of havoc between each edition. Thankfully the last wave was a mild one, and it appears that the world is slowing moving on. 

The last six months have been reasonably smooth sailing at work. We’ve been keeping busy, building some new sites, supporting our clients and also getting better at working remotely. Along the way, there have been some joyful events like our teammate Divya tying the knot, and also some downers like bidding adieu to our colleague Archit. Here is a brief compilation of the highlights since our last letter to you:

1. 🗣️ In August, Prateek gave a talk titled ​“Micro-caching in Nginx for High Performance” at Bangalore Site Speed. Check this talk out if you’re keen to know how we make our server-rendered websites blazing fast.

2. 🗣️ The following month Prateek spoke at the CSS loading and Critical CSS conference. This time he dived into the frontend side of performance in his talk ​“Critical CSS for CMS-based, Server-rendered Websites”.

3. 🐣 Over the next couple of months, two projects went live — both executed in collaboration with Cracker & Rush who lead the design while we tackled the architecture and the technology.

   1. First up was Ramaiah University of Applied Sciences — an academic institution in Bangalore. Being one of our largest websites, this one had kept us busy all of 2020. Its backend architecture powers 18 micro-sites (one for each faculty/​department) from a single Craft CMS instance. 
   2. The next one was Vahura — a full-service legal, tax, governance and compliance specialist search and consulting firm located in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore.

4. ⛰️ In November we did our first in-person workshop in nearly 20 months. We’d been itching to take a break from Miro boards and Zoom calls for a long time. We couldn’t have asked for a better break than visiting a remote corner of Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh with our friends at Tiffinbox to brainstorm an exciting project.

5. 🏖️ In December, Prateek and Souvik took a flight to Sri Lanka to turn away from usual work. They spent a week reflecting on our first 10 years and bracing up for the next 10. Inshallah!

6. 🎁 Also, what’s a holiday season without a gift? This year our entire team got an Everyday Backpack Zip. If you know anyone at Peak Design, please give them a shout out on our behalf for creating such a thoughtfully designed bag.

7. 👩‍💻 Earlier this month we grew back to being a team of 5. Meet Anita Chouhan our newest team member who’s jumped on board as a Web Developer.

8. 🎂 Last but not least, it’s our birthday edition! We turned 11 today. 🥳

If you’re keen to learn more about what we’ve been up to, you might want to check out our detailed year-in-review post covering 2020 and 2021. 

And We’re Still Hiring

We continue to look for a mid-to-senior web developer. We’d like the candidate to be able to lead project development. This is a remote position and the candidate may be located anywhere in India or the rest of the world (we want at least a 4‑hour time overlap). We’d be grateful if you could spread the word. And even better if you can connect us to someone who shares our passion for the web (we’ve got a handsome referral fee for a successful hire).

After a long time, we are experiencing some semblance of normalcy. We’re plotting to get our team together and are really excited about this prospect. What’s keeping you excited? We’re eager to know how things are at your end. 

Leaving you with some fun snaps of our travels, gifts, collaborators and the team.

Sending you some good vibes,
– From all of us at Miranj

Miranj is Anita, Divya, Paul, Prateek, and Souvik.