Our blog

  • 2020 – 21 Year(s) in Review

    Author
    Prateek Rungta
    Published

    We’ve been publishing year-in-review posts since 2017. These offer a good opportunity to pause and look back — take stock of what we’ve accomplished, how much we’ve grown, where we faltered, and all the ups and downs along the journey. Of course it also helps present a snapshot of the company’s journey to the rest of the world, but it is as much an exercise of reflection as it is an exercise in documentation.

    We missed out on this for 2020, the First Year of Covid™, so this will be a dual year in review for both 2020 and 2021. There’s a lot of ground to cover, so let’s get started.

    🌱 Growing Practice

    Our core practise remains that of building websites. It is why we show up at work every single day. And while we continue to practise web design and development, project after project, taking a moment and looking back made us realise how far we have come.

    • Our engagements have grown in scope, in scale and in ambition. We worked on a university website with 70 different content-types and 18 different micro-sites for various faculties and departments, all supported by a single CMS.

    • While we continue to develop deep expertise in Craft CMS, we are just as excited to adopt new tools and technologies and explore unchartered territory. We got our hands dirty with Svelte and the nuances of the OpenType font format in order to build a powerful browser based tool for testing fonts (with a focus on Indic typefaces).

    • We have been lucky to have a steady stream of interesting enquiries come our way, and unfortunately we’ve had to turn down several of them because we have our hands full.

    • We managed to successfully adapt our intensive in-person workshops into fully remote sessions, staggered over a few weeks, to ensure full participation of all the required stakeholders.

    • Guiding Tech, one of our flagship projects, was acquired by a US-based media company. We had revamped their website in 2017, and had since been constantly improving the tech and adding new features over the years.

    👯 Team Effort

    We have been building websites for over ten years now. But for most of this time, the execution was done by Souvik and/​or me. We were now starting to grow a team, both on the project execution side of things as well as the operations side of things. This meant learning how to distribute work. Align on outcomes. Defining a voice and a benchmark for the studio which resides not just in our heads but is accessible to and mould-able by every member of the team. Lots of processes were experimented with. Lessons were learned, extra baggage was shed, new tools were adopted and old ones discarded.

    We added two new people to the team — Paul Manem and Divya Chauhan.

    Paul Divya

    • Paul is a self-taught web designer and developer from France but based out of Phnom Penh in Cambodia. He has been making websites for 10 years and had already been using Craft CMS for some of his projects before he joined us in the summer of 2020. If you meet him, watch out for his dry sense of humour and witty side-remarks.

    • Divya joined Miranj as an executive manager to help with the operational side of things. She comes from the hospitality industry and is great at tackling operations, logistics and client interactions. She joined us in early 2021, and ever since our team activities and celebrations have become livelier and full of cheer.

    We still have a long way to go, but we’re steadily growing more efficient, predictable and timely with our processes and deliveries.

    🎂 Ten Years Young

    Did I just mention we’ve been building websites for over 10 years now? That’s right, we completed a decade in business! Feels like a long way back when Souvik and me were running around accountants, trying to come up with names that had .com and .in domains available, and reaching out to friends and family to land our first client. What a ride it has been. Despite remaining small throughout, we’ve travelled a long way from a tiny basement office in 2011 to now having a distributed team across India and Cambodia. We had big plans to celebrate this milestone with our clients, friends, collaborators and well-wishers, but sadly had to defer that due to the pandemic.

    There are a bunch of other Indian companies that started around the same 2011 (plus/​minus one year) period who we like to think of as our batchmates — HasGeek, 3 Sided Coin, Blue Tokai, Zerodha etc., and we’re glad to be in their company. At the same time, we also remember a lot more who are no longer around. Ten years often does not feel like much in lifespan terms. Yet it is long enough to have experienced few of our clients’ entire team undergo two rotations of its members leaving and joining, while we’ve been steadily supporting their websites all along.

    We are grateful to everyone who has helped us make it this far.

    🏕 Remote by Default Only

    A pandemic. In our lifetimes. Much like the rest of the world, we had no idea what to expect or how things were going to play out. Everyone complied with the lockdowns, of course, but we continued working from our homes. The office was around, something we’d go back to once things were normal. Normal, heh. Calls upon calls seemed to be the new normal. No social interactions seemed to be the new normal. Blurred lines between life and work seemed to be the new normal.

    At some point, it became increasingly apparent that there was no going back in the foreseeable future. We decided to let go of our (beloved) workspace and instead decided to invest in everyone’s home setups. We decided to have a team member from a different country and ensure they were treated no different than a team member in the same city. We switched to regular virtual team activities in the form of daily stand-ups, weekly town-halls and monthly chill-sessions.

    Meeting with the the team using birthday backdrops Team meeting using Cafe Perk from the TV show Friends as the backdrop

    🎂 Birthday celebrations for Souvik (left) and Divya (right).

    We strived to operate in a remote by default mode even when the entire team was co-located, so the initial lockdowns didn’t quite bring the house down. But we have now managed to completely re-orient ourselves to become a fully-remote organisation.

    🧧 Giving Back

    We have finally started giving back in the form of regular institutional donations. We decided to donate a percentage of our profits at the end of each financial year and, after much deliberation, decided to split our pool three ways between projects or organisations that:

    1. Impact our work
    2. Impact our industry
    3. Impact our society

    Everyone on the team is encouraged to nominate (and campaign for) worthy candidates in all three categories. We then conduct a poll for the submitted candidates and pick one winner in each category. So far we have made donations to Gulp, The Internet Archive, and Goonj in 2020 and Software Freedom Conservancy, Mozilla, and AltNews in 2021. We urge you to join our efforts in supporting these organisations if they resonate with you.

    👥 Community Initiatives

    One of the things we love about the web industry is the community. All of us at Miranj learned web design through the abundance of knowledge and resources made available by fellow web designers of all levels — beginners, practitioners, and experts; freelancers, studio folks, and big tech workers. We too have always wanted to give back and grow this pool. We have written and spoken about our techniques and shared our code, albeit intermittently. But we were able to do this in two big, consistent ways recently.

    🎙 Appearances

    Talks
    Features
    Discussions
    Writing

    The Lows

    There was a noticeable, undeniable increase in work load and stress during the last two years. Some of this was undoubtedly directly attributable to the pandemic raging all around us, but a lot of it was also due to our struggles grappling with the gradually blurring lines between life and work. Some of it was due to growing pains inside a young team still figuring things out. There were also reasons that had nothing to do with work. Regardless, all of us struggled for different periods of time over the last two years. We talked about it, took time off, travelled when possible, and attempted a lot of small changes. We are in a much better place now, but remain careful and reflective of the time gone by.

    Work Anniversary meeting with the the team featuring an Oprah Winfrey meme that says 'Happy Anniversary. You Get Another Day of Work!!'

    We also saw a departure from the team. Archit Chandra, our first long-term team member decided to move on from Miranj late last year and explore other opportunities. We’ll be missing out on his deep care for process, constant feedback/​engagement that helped us get more organised as a studio, and his astonishing levels of trivia and general knowledge.

    Virtual meeting with a quiz being presented by Archit with the rest of the team in attendance

    Archit put together a quiz for the team as his exit interview.

    We wish him well and continue to cheer him from the sidelines.

    Lastly, a project that we had worked on and completed during the first few months of 2020 has, after awaiting a public launch for almost a year, now been shelved completely. Another project that had launched in 2019 went offline after a year as the organisation ceased all communication (and perhaps operations).

    2020 – 21 in Numbers

    • 2 new team members, 1 departure
    • Undertook 13 client projects
    • Worked with 5 collaborators
    • Hosted 2 events and 2 talk series
    • Worked with/​in 5 geographies
    • 6 project launches
    • 1 new plugin release
    • 1 person got married
  • 2019 in Review

    Author
    Souvik Das Gupta
    Published

    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.

    Prateek explaining feature cards A typical intense moment in a workshop Clients brainstorming

    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.

    Souvik leading a session

    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 18th and 20th. 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.

    Souvik and Prateek share a laugh with Ben Parizek of Barrel Strength Design

    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.

    Prateek speaking at Dot All 2019

    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.

    World IA Day

    Souvik introducing World IA Day Audience at WIAD 2019, New Delhi

    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 23rd 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 Exposé 41 Poster

    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 282019.

    Responding to Audience Questions

    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 sitting in a shack

    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.

  • Website Hosting Service and Digital Ocean Partnership

    Author
    Souvik Das Gupta
    Published

    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. https://cdn.miranj.in/v4/media/announcement/website-hosting-service-and-digital-ocean-partnership/DO_SPP_Partner_White.png


    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.