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As the pandemic rages through India (and different parts of the world) we’ve all been stuck at home for months on end. Everyone’s skeptical, the mood ain’t great and it’s hard to remain cheerful. Wouldn’t it be great to take a break from 2020 and reflect back on the times when meeting people, attending conferences, travelling and generally being in a happy state of mind were a thing? I decided to do just that and pen another year-in-review post. Yes, it’s 10 full months since the year ended but we posted a delayed review last year as well and now we can call ourselves trendsetters.

2019 was a year of consolidation and gradually stepping forward. We undertook twelve different engagements of varying sizes and evolved throughout the year. Let’s look at some important developments, milestones and highlights for Miranj from 2019.

Helping Organisations Think and Strategise

We started out as a studio with two key skills — building websites, and finishing them on time and within budget. The latter skill is better known as project management.

The first step in any project was understanding the requirements. The process relied heavily on clients knowing what they want and being able to articulate that. We often got frustrated if clients were vague about their requirements because we considered it a pre-requisite for our work. But as we gathered more experience our thoughts evolved from ​“clients don’t know what they want” to ​“we need to help them understand their needs”. Back in 2016, this translated into our very first project discovery workshop. The process was rudimentary, relying mostly on frameworks from other workshops we’d participated in previously. But we stuck to it and started conducting workshops before every sizeable project.

Over the years these workshops have undergone several rounds of iteration and have achieved a clear structure — understanding the problem-space, defining the solution-space and finally discussing the execution and project management. We usually conduct the workshop at the client location to ensure representation from as many departments as possible. Then we return to our base for the execution armed with clarity on the goals, priorities and the overall scope of the project. It makes our work more focussed, smoothens the execution process and helps achieve greater impact.

Discovery and Strategy Workshops have become an essential component of every mid-to-large size project we undertake, and in 2019 we started offering them as a stand-alone service. The workshops not only help us in acquiring a deep understanding of an organisation’s needs but also helps the clients make better strategic decisions about their website, and at times, even their business. Last year we conducted 4 such workshops. In the future, we hope to offer this to organisations who are thinking about transforming their website but need a good decision framework. If you’re aware of any such organisation who can benefit from such an exercise, email hidden; JavaScript is required.

Dominated by Non-Profit Engagements

At Miranj we’re mindful about the projects we take on. Very early in our journey, we wrote about our sweet spot. Gradually we also articulated our purpose. We need to keep reflecting on our experiences and defining what type of work we find meaningful. From the early days we found fulfilment in engaging with folks that work for the society — organisations in the development sector, projects that empower people, individuals who fight for rights, and so on. Gradually we also started working in the academic sector. Over the past 9 years, we have worked with many CSOs, educational institutions and other not-for-profit institutions.

We’ve always had an affinity for the not-for-profit sector. Among all the enquiries that land on our plate these are the ones that make us most excited and give us a strong sense of fulfilment once we’ve completed the project.

2019 was a special year. We hit a new milestone. Our revenue from not-for-profit projects touched nearly 2x our commercial revenue. It’s hard to predict if we’ll be able to repeat this feat in the coming years but we definitely hope we do.

Surprising Cross-Geography Collaborations

At Miranj we spend far more time discussing our craft and honing our skills than thinking about business. We’ve mostly been discovered through word of mouth referrals. Consequently, our projects have been predominantly based in India. But unlike previous years, in 2019 we ended up engaging with clients and collaborators from 6 different countries. This is a significant number for a tiny team like ours. It’s very reassuring to know that somehow people from different parts of the world have managed to stumble upon us. One such email had dropped in from Paul Manem, a web designer-developer based in Cambodia, in late 2018. We were overjoyed to meet someone like him who shared so many of our work ideologies. Last year we ended up collaborating with him on a project and it was a very pleasurable experience.

Massive Technical Upgrades

Sizeable software is rarely rewritten from ground-up. But when it gets rewritten it’s usually a big leap forward on one hand and disruptive on the other. In 2018 Craft CMS made one such jump with Craft 3. Three years and three months in the making, Craft 3 was a completely re-architected piece of software. Big changes, although for the better, are disruptive. All Craft plugins had to be rewritten, and website upgrades needed significant work. In 2019, we undertook the highly technical upgrade of two of our largest websites (IndiaBioscience and Guiding Tech) from Craft 2 to Craft 3. The upgrade to Craft 3 also allowed us to refactor some underlying code and in turn achieve better performance, stability, SEO and authoring experience.

The upgrade to Craft 3 helped us grow a lot in the technical direction. We learned a new PHP framework (Yii2), adopted the Composer package manager, deployed a SiteDiff tool and upgraded all our Craft plugins.

Working with a Big Name

One of our highlights from last year was our work with Azim Premji University. We worked on a new website for the university with the help of two fellow collaborators Shalini Sekhar and Kavya Murthy. Working with the university was a surprisingly enjoyable experience but unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a significant delay on the launch schedule. We are hopeful that it will happen soon. Later in the year we also went on to work with the Azim Premji Philanthropic Initiatives to help them strategise their future web presence.

We feel quite lucky to have had an opportunity to work with the socially conscious institutions set up by Mr Azim Premji who’s widely regarded as the most generous giver in corporate India. Small teams rarely get to work with such widely recognisable names and hopefully, in the coming years, we’ll get to work with more such reputed institutions.

Dot All 2019

Dot All is an annual international conference on Craft CMS and modern web development. We’ve been participating in this conference every year since its very first edition in 2017. In 2019 Dot All took place in Montréal, Canada between September 18^th and 20^th. It was an exciting opportunity to hop on a couple of long flights and meet the amazing Craft Community. And of course, visiting a new country.

Image Courtesy Dot All

For Miranj it was a special one since Prateek’s proposal titled ​“Fortifying Craft for High Traffic” was accepted by the Dot All organisers. Prateek’s talk covered our learnings from the Guiding Tech website i.e. how we’ve optimised a low-powered server to handle millions of visitors each month by strategically caching the website at two places — Nginx (using FastCGI Micro-Caching) and flag-based template caches in Craft CMS. The talk received great reviews from the participants, and generated instant interest among the performance lovers in the community. It was a validation of how much we’ve improved over the years.

Image Courtesy Dot All

Just like every year, the conference was an opportunity to catch up with old friends and make new ones. We grabbed fresh beers, shared dumplings and also went on a walking tour around the old city of Montréal.

The fabulous fifteen tour of #Montréal with @rungta @ademers @souvikdg @marionnewlevant @jamiejenks_ @ryanirelan @mattgrayisok @gaijinity @carriehd @paperskeleton #DotAll19 #craftcms pic​.twit​ter​.com/​h​r​w​m​K​AW369

— Ben Croker (@ben_pylo) September 22, 2019

World IA Day

World Information Architecture Day (WIAD) is a one-day annual celebration to evangelise the practise of information architecture and is held in dozens of locations across the world. Souvik has been the local organiser for New Delhi since 2018, and together with the help of Abhishek and Namita organised the 2019 edition on 23^rd Feb. This was the second year of Miranj supporting WIAD in New Delhi. The event brought together people from various backgrounds — designers, lawyers and architects — to discuss various topics on Information Architecture.

DesignxDesign Exposé 41

DesignxDesign, an initiative by Alliance Française de Delhi and Studio IF, has been nurturing the design and creative community since 2010. Through exposés, round tables, exhibitions and tête-à-têtes the community facilitates conversations among professionals and educators in various fields of design — Architecture/​Habitat, Graphic/​Communication, Product/​Industrial and Apparel/​Textile. We were invited to present our work at DesignxDesign Exposé 41 alongside RLDA – an architecture studio based in New Delhi. Incidentally, we were also the first New Media/​Digital Design studio to have taken the stage at a DesignxDesign Exposé. The event took place at Alliance Française de Delhi on November 28, 2019.

Image Courtesy DesignxDesign on Facebook

This was the first time both Prateek and I shared a stage together. We used the opportunity to talk about our philosophy, share how the web is more than just a visual medium and show some of our work spanning several years. You can take a look at our slides on SpeakerDeck. The session was also being broadcasted live on Facebook so there’s a video if you’re interested.

We Grew

Let’s be honest, we suck at growing our team. It took us 8 years and a few hits and misses (more on this below) to find the right candidate. But now that we have, please meet Archit Chandra who joined our team as a web developer.

Archit is a self-taught web developer who is keen to learn different aspects of web technologies. Before joining Miranj he ran an independent webshop called GreyThink Labs where he created numerous company websites and online news publications. His experience was a great fit for Miranj — not only did he actively work on CMS-based websites but he also had a good understanding of how small creative businesses run. From the get-go, Archit has brought in some fresh opinions in our studio and has always been challenging our ways of doing things. He’s an avid listener of podcasts, loves reading books and is a passionate follower of Chelsea FC.

Setbacks

Reflections are incomplete without acknowledging the low-points. While many of them feel part-and-parcel of running a business a couple of them stand etched in our memories.

The first one was a bumpy project where the communication with a collaborator had broken down. It was a frustrating experience — misaligned expectations, unexpected turns, client expressing surprise, uncomfortable meetings and more. We’d learned a lot from a similar situation many years back where the communication between the client and a collaborator had broken down. But this time around we didn’t directly own the client relationship. As a result, we had to negotiate some significant challenges in navigating expectations, steering conversations and managing resentment. Eventually, we were able to take the project to closure but it left behind a sour taste. The entire experience reaffirmed to us the importance of project management. Creative services are likely to find project management unexciting. But laying out a clear plan and process so that each stakeholder understands her/​his role and responsibilities can go a long way in averting a fallout. Clearly, there’s so much to learn. If you have any thoughts or experiences on this subject email hidden; JavaScript is required.

The other setback was our first experience of a wrong hire. Miranj has hired only a handful of times and we’re far from mastering the art of hiring (or dealing with bad experiences). It was a repeating cycle of conflict and attempt to resolve issues. Every conversation ended in hope for change but eventually resulted in disappointments. We kept trying for a few months but eventually had to call it off. Letting go of someone is not easy. We’d experienced a lot of uncertainty and guilt a few years back when we had to let go of someone for entirely different reasons. But this time despite knowing that we were making the right decision it still felt bad.

Recap

2019 started slow and breezy, turned into a raging mid-year and came to a calm end. Through the year we evolved our services, learned new tools and techniques, entered new technical partnerships and undertook new challenges. It was a year of growth in every possible sense — in our skills, in our experiences, in our revenue, in our service offerings and even our team size. Feels good to have accomplished so much last year.

2019 in Numbers

• Undertook 12 client projects
• Worked with 6 collaborators
• Delivered 2 talks
• Hosted 1 event
• Plugins: 1 new release, 6 updates
• Worked with/​in 6 countries
• Worked with 5 non-profit organisations
• 4 co-workers
• 4 workshops
• 1 new team member

Clearly, our in-review posts are published quite late. If you’re curious about what we’re up to this year you need not wait until mid-2021. Earlier this year we started an occasional newsletter. The next edition will be published shortly and we’ll tell you what’s been cooking in 2020. Do subscribe and expect an update soon.

Back around 2013 with every passing project, we were trying to push ourselves to break down websites into small, atomic information pieces, almost in the object-oriented way. The more we pushed ourselves the more we got disappointed by the website tools (and paradigms) that surrounded us. On the one hand, we felt constrained by WordPress’ pervasive Pages and Posts paradigm. It was (and still remains) so ubiquitous that everyone seems comfortable in imagining websites as a collection of hierarchical pages and an accompanying blog. On the other hand, some tools (like Jekyll) supported atomic content pieces by combining data formats like YAML and Markdown, but fell short in extending a reasonable authoring experience. We had reached a point of dreaming up our own custom CMS architecture but stopped short of implementing it since that would be a significant deviation from our core work i.e. designing and developing content-driven websites.

An year later, while working on the Quicksand website, we were desperately looking for a reliable Content Management System (CMS) that could complement our approach while delivering a good authoring experience. That’s when we stumbled upon Craft — an un-opinionated, content-first CMS. It touted several good features but there were a few noteworthy ones which caught our immediate attention:

Flexible Content Modelling

This one hit the nail right on the head. Craft allowed us to deconstruct content into small pieces and build websites bottom-up. We even learned that our object-oriented approach was called Content Modelling. It freed us from existing content paradigms and allowed us to architect the website content uniquely as per project needs.

Relational Fields

Every independent piece of content modelled inside Craft can link to any piece of content across the website. Relationships are extremely powerful because not only do they help create cross-references and allow people to navigate to related information, but they greatly cut down redundant data capture. Shared pieces of information can now be independently created once and simply linked/​reused in several related places.

Matrix Field

This was around the time when design systems were maturing and the Matrix field complemented a modular component-based page design. It enabled the creation of re-usable blocks/​patterns which could be included multiple times on a page. Further, the blocks could be moved up or down to re-order content within a page.

Live Preview

It’s very reassuring to be able to review how the content will show up on the website before it’s published. And it’s even more powerful if you can see a live preview as-you-type. That’s exactly what Craft shipped and it reminded us of the experimental interfaces demonstrated by Bret Victor in his talk Inventing on Principle.

Clean Separation of Concerns in Code

Developers crave to focus on one thing at a time – data, business logic or templating. An architecture that cleanly separates these three layers makes the code more resilient, error-free and secure. Not to mention it’s also far more enjoyable to work with.

Security

The Craft team has never beaten around the bush about their security measures. They’d been following all the good practices in the book, published zero-day fixes and diligently updated vulnerability databases. We were re-assured that Craft’s security was taken very seriously by its makers.

One-Time License and Developer Support

Craft was not a free CMS (unlike many popular alternatives) but their pricing was very compelling — reasonable for the value it delivered, affordable for a small business and importantly a one-time fee for perpetual use. We saw this as good thing because it assured us that the product had a sound business model and that they’d likely be around for a long time to come. Also, who doesn’t like developer support from the makers of the product.

Zero-byte (empty) output for fresh CMS installation

If this one sounds trivial, trust us, it’s a profound change. When a CMS does not impose a starter theme but instead comes with zero front-end code, it puts the control right back in the hands of the designer and the developer. The CMS landscape had many firmly established players (WordPress, Drupal and the likes) but Craft was a breath of fresh air in this regard.

Not only did Craft check most of our requirements but it also raised our curiosity and excitement. However, like with any new software, we approached our first few Craft projects with extreme caution. It took us about a year to grow confident in Craft’s versatility, and then we were hooked! Quicksand was our first Craft project and it continues to be running stably today.

Fast forward to late 2018. The Craft team rolled out the Craft Partner Network to bring together agencies from around the globe with proven expertise in Craft. With over 4 years of Craft CMS experience (at that time), our team satisfied the review criteria and we became an official Craft CMS Partner — the first agency from India, and among the earliest set of members from the Asia Pacific region.

Over the years Craft has enabled Miranj to take on several information-dense projects with formidable IA challenges. Craft’s feature set has been steadily expanding and today we’re using it to power some fairly complex use-cases. We leveraged its multi-lingual and multi-site capabilities in MIIT and Forech. In fact, in the latter project we hooked up Google Translate to pull in automated translations for French, German and Spanish (thanks to Craft’s extensible architecture). Our client IndiaBioscience is making great use of the multi-user capability with user groups and fine-grained permissions system to collectively manage their large website. We used Craft’s powerful Twig templates to enable Guiding Tech to syndicate content with external services. Craft also has a growing Plugin Store where one can find many useful extensions for the CMS, including a few that we‘ve built and published. And perhaps the most important of all (and dare I say — our favourite feature of Craft CMS) is the thriving community that is growing steadily in India and around the world. The close-knit community is connected over Discord, Stack Exchange, an annual conference (Dot All) and the Craft Partner Network.

With over six years of Craft experience, we are proud to be at the forefront of its adoption in India and the neighbouring geographies. During this journey we’ve participated in every Dot All Conference and have been invited to present our techniques at the 2018 and 2019 editions. Needless to say, Craft CMS has been a great ally in facilitating our purpose and we couldn’t be happier with our decision to adopt this technology.

If you’d like to learn more about Craft CMS and how it compares with some of the other CMSes out there, join me on June 6^th (Saturday) at Content Web — a series of online discussions on content publishing, web design, web development and the business around it.

As a web studio, we have always been focused on our core craft of designing and developing websites. Hosting would often be an afterthought and we’d typically suggest clients to go for a shared web host. After all, shared web hosting was inexpensive and did not require much technical oversight. We would guide our clients through the purchase process, deploy our code and bring our engagement to a closure.

This approach worked fine for a few years, but over time we started noticing several drawbacks:

1. Server administration is a bit of a blind spot for clients. Some of them have even suffered website data loss because they overlooked renewal reminders.
2. Our faith in shared hosting was depleting. Long support wait times, poor performance, being unable to reach our server while some other site on the same shared-host was experiencing a DDoS attack, etc. were frequently souring our experience. Further, the lack of control over server configuration severely limited our ability to install tools or fine-tune the server to meet modern performance benchmarks.
3. Modern VPS providers were steadily decreasing prices while matching or eclipsing shared host offerings. They provided better access to hardware and high control over the software.
4. Hosting technologies have become more complex in the last decade. It’s no longer just about the hardware (and bandwidth) specifications advertised by the web hosting services. A modern hosting strategy needs a holistically approach considering several aspects such as SSL renewals, reliable outgoing emails, caching, CDN, backups, software updates, and more.

By 2018 these challenges had become important enough for us to actively seek alternatives. We came across many different approaches — unmanaged VPS servers, managed servers, app hosting solutions, etc. However, none struck the right balance between —

• Extending full server control
• Ease of server management
• Reliable, high-frequency backups
• Costs

Eventually, we decided to get our hands dirty. Based on our experience of setting up the server architecture for Guiding Tech (which receives lots of traffic and high rate of updates), we slowly put together a hosting solution which features:

• High-performance LEMP stack with FastCGI micro-caching
• Automated server-side image compression and optimisation
• Multi-tiered backup strategy — server snapshots, local backups and offsite backups
• Automated monitoring of uptime and server vitals

We launched in 2018, and in the two years since we’ve been providing a highly performant and reliable hosting service to our clients based on the above architecture. Under the hood, we use Digital Ocean VPS nodes and reinforce the software to deal with heavy loads and traffic bursts. Digital Ocean’s developer-friendly infrastructure (and their community documentation) has played an important role in our journey to offer high-quality website hosting. Through this post, I’m happy to also share that we’ve recently joined the Digital Ocean Solutions Partner Program. This brings us even closer to the Digital Ocean community. 

If you’d like to learn more about how we’ve scaled inexpensive VPS hardware to serve hundreds of requests per second, check out Prateek’s talk at Dot All 2019. If you’d like to discuss more, email hidden; JavaScript is required.

The World Information Architecture Day (WIAD) is an annual celebration to evangelise the practice of information architecture. It is held in dozens of locations across the world, including our home city of New Delhi. The global theme for World IA Day 2020 was ​“The IA Element” — highlighting how IA is integral to achieving the best results.

We celebrated World IA Day 2020 on the 22^nd February at The Circle, Huda City Centre. The event featured talks by four speakers touching upon various aspects of information architecture across history and culture, interface design, data journalism and visualisations. Here’s a short round up of each of the talks (with links to the slides) —

Let’s Define IA

The event was kickstarted by Manish Saini, an Information Experience Designer who’s currently working at Cvent. Manish laid the ground work for the event describing how one can relate to information architecture in their work, and how to define the practice of IA. (See Manish’s slides)

Decoding Crafts: Mapping Asia InCH Encyclopedia

The following talk was by Richa Tiwari from Craft Revival Trust. She started off with a brief history about how various craft forms were affected by rapid industrialisation in the 1900s. She further went on to share how her organisation has been mapping the intangible cultural heritage of South Asia into an encyclopedia. (See Richa’s slides)

Humanising Digital Interactions

The third talk was by Vikramaditya Sharma – the founder of Now Form. Vikramaditya made us take a look at the various forms of digital interactions we experience in our life and how these are slowly turning into more natural human interactions, one step at a time. (See Vikramaditya’s slides)

Making Sense of Data in an Indian Newsroom

The last speaker Sriharsha Devulapalli works at Mint. Sriharsha shared several stories and experiences of being a data journalist in India. He went on to explain the process of producing good data stories — right from data collection and cleaning to visualisations. (See Sriharsha’s slides)

After 2018 and 2019, this was the third year of Miranj supporting World IA Day in New Delhi. Thanks to Abhishek and Manish for volunteering and to Archit for onsite logistics. (See full photo album)

We look forward to another year of sharpening our Information Architecture skills.