TYPO3 In The Wild: An Interview with Sanjay from NITSAN

After being part of the TYPO III Mentorship Program I wanted to see how someone who uses TYPO3 in their everyday life goes about it.

I recalled that Sanjay Chauhan had mentioned that they use TYPO3 at their company, as well as headless TYPO3 I should have a look at.

So I reached out and asked him to get on a call for an interview.

Here it is below:

About Sanjay

Me: I know you're a co-founder of NITSAN, but I'd like to know something about you. Who is Sanjay? Sanjay: It's always difficult to say something about oneself --
Me: -- which is why I like this question
Sanjay -- Most people know me as the person who has been working with TYPO3 for 10+ years in India. I think that's special because TYPO3 is known more in Europe.
So yeah, this is Sanjay from NITSAN Technologies and we are working mostly with TYPO3 that's why I am trying to stay connected with the TYPO3 community. I am one of the partners of NITSAN - NIT is Nitin, SAN is Sanjay. I am currently working as a CTO.

The Vision

Me: On your site it says "Two founders. One vision". What was the vision?
Sanjay: India is quite a big country, we have many towns. In my hometown, the aim was to try to provide a platform for students and people within our hometown. That was one of the motivations to create this agency, and it worked well because people found opportunity - why should they migrate from their hometown? Right?That is that is one of the goals.

What NITSAN Does

Me: What exactly does NITSAN do? You say solutions, but what do you mean by that?
Sanjay: NITSAN is an agency that has been working for 11 years, primarily on website and application development.
On the website development with the CMS solution we work with TYPO3, on the other hand with application development we are working with Javascript.

Before TYPO3

Me: I saw that you started using TYPO3 in 2013. What did you use before that?
Sanjay: Ah haha... We tried a lot of things like WordPress - that was an era of experimentation with CMS. People initiated their own open-source project like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla and a lot of things like that. But we found TYPO3 to have the robust solution, you can say. Not to say that WordPress is bad, but...
Me: That's alright...
Sanjay: The point is that if you find all the solutions within one CMS, then why should you choose somethingelse? So that was a major concern, that we choose a CMS which provides everything - like multilingual, multi-site and has the robust code that is more important...
So I've tried a lot of things and TYPO3 was one solution.
Me: ...it's the one that offered--
Sanjay: I think why is a big question, there are a lot of answers, haha. I think we could set a separate call for why TYPO3
Me: We could do that, I can make a day for "Why TYPO3". --so because it solved all the problems you had.

How They Handle Frontend

Me: You said you use TYPO3 for websites and applications - TYPO3 mainly for the website, yes. From what I've learnt when you make a TYPO3 site it has to have styling, the frontend. Which entails fluid template engines or something. Are those the ones you use or do you use a different template engine for the customers you serve?
Sanjay: Yeah, typically... That's a good question because times have changed, like rendering and the frontend... Actually, on 80 or 85% of cases, we stick with TYPO3 because that is absolutely fine. They have a good backend and with fluid templating, of course, that's typical.
Right now we are getting more enquiries, like hey we want to make the frontend with vue.js. I don't say it's perfect but based on the needs of the customers - If they want to choose a headless approach, they have many channels to work with. Not sure what is the future on that, but here we are working with that model also.
Me: Okay...
Sanjay: Because sometimes it can be that, okay, people are doing that thing, let's do let's do that. But they don't know the drawbacks. Of course, there are advantages, but the customer should be clear on that - this is really suitable for my project and we should do that.

Technical Aspects of Their Work

Me: We've delved over the more general aspects, could you take me through some of the more technical things of what you do, or what you used to do when you started? Let's say a customer comes to you saying they want a website built, how do you handle that on the technical side of things?
Sanjay: Yeah, the technical side, there are a lot of things. I will try to explain it in short. So first of all, we prefer to know, if the person is technical or non-technical. Try to set up everything with the language. For example composer with installation, should have LTS version. Deploy branch should be automated with CI/CD. We always have a base as the concrete so future upgrades and maintenance can be handled.
That is the setup; composer, CI/CD, auto-deployment, staging, production and all the branch wide deployment.
Then regarding TYPO3, there are a few things - one is template development, the other is. For the templating, we prefer to stick to the core way. Use the backend layout, and go with the standards for creating custom elements. Using the fluid instead of the other processes that are available.

So, you don't need to use every bit of TYPO3, there are other challenges. For templating fortunately we have designed one - parent to child concept templating just like any other CMS- to base things off of. You don't need to rewrite everything for every project.

The other part is custom extensions when a particular solution is not compatible with the templating or they are no ready-made ones available.

We prefer to go with experts, that is you should use maximum code with TYPO3 core, so that in the future it should be easily upgradeable.

So, yeah. there are other fundamentals like webhooks etc...

Me: Alright... Sanjay: I hope that's fine. Me: No, no, that's very technical. That's what I was looking for.

Sanjay and TYPO3

Me: Do you feel TYPO3 makes the work you do run smoother? Or better or more efficient? I don't know, whichever word you want to use?
Sanjay: That's a really nice question because, for the new people, it's always a big question. But hey, I didn't get that much help. I'm getting stuck in that class...

Me: So, I split the question...

Sanjay: I'm just trying to explain my history. You say, "How do you feel" is like saying okay, I'm feeling great because I have 10 years of experience, haha - that is not an answer.
I think the point is that the learning curve is a bit high compared to others CMS. You spend tons of weeks then you feel comfortable compared to other CMS. Even the documentation is much better compared to past years.

There are a lot of things in the initial period, you need to spend more time on. But after learning the things, your life will be heaven.

This is one of the initiatives TYPO3 is trying to solve - that it's too hard.

For example, I'm writing some TYPO syntax and I just caught some stuff that I didn't get. What should I do? How can I debug...
Me: hmm--hmm
Sanjay: That is always something painful for the people. I think the TYPO3 community is doing really great on that. They have started doing some things for the beginners, so they can easily be initiated on the project, or setup.
That is a really big topic, that the community is really working well on it .. Me: -- they are...
Sanjay: I hope the answer was...
Me: That was more than I expected and I am very happy about it.

Winning An Award

Me: How was it winning a TYPO3 award? That experience?
Sanjay: That was an amazing moment for us. Because that was our second visit to Berlin at the TYPO3 conference. Actually, we have a good customer base, I think you know-- Me: -- yes, I do
Sanjay: We work on that project for one and a half years, and the project was really nice. I think it was very clear that the brand and project size was nice and there are good chances that we will get it.
I think most of the credit goes to the customer because you know because if you got such kind of enterprise customers, there are chances that your name or your brand will get noticed. And of course, our team did their best on that project.

The NITSAN Team

Me: Which brings me to my next question. How big is the team at NITSAN currently? Sanjay: Currently we have 25 people. 80% are working full time.
Me: So that's developers, integrators, marketers...? Sanjay: Uh, we are small, but brevity, haha
Me: haha

What Sanjay Would Like To Share

Me: Is there anything else you'd like to tell me about you, about NITSAN and about TYPO3?
Sanjay: I would say many things, but T3Terminal is one of the things, in my perspective, because I have been working in TYPO3 for many years and you always have something in your mind, like hey if I get the time...
Me: -- I'm gonna do this...
Sanjay: I want to do that thing because that is one of the lacking points in TYPO3... You know that in the market there are enterprise customers there are middle customers, there are the normal customers. So TYPO3 never gets the chance to attract such types of people. They would say, "You are saying your product is excellent then why is the market share so low?" Me: Mhmm...
Sanjay: That is always a basic question people have. "Okay, you guys are saying it's fantastic, the product is great. What is the problem?"
So that was one of the dreams that we should have some kind of store or marketplace -- Me: Okay
Sanjay: -- where people can... developers, they get a chance to create something and sell something. So initially, that was the plan when we launched at the last conference when the T3Terminal platform was unveiled..
Unfortunately, we didn't get more vendors. Because we launched as a marketplace. That is one of the things that personally I feel very bad about. But still, we kept going. Like okay, we are here let's do our best.
At the moment, we have 100 products, we are getting good customers. Me: That's good!
Sanjay: The other thing is that most of the customer, when we say why you choose this. They say I know that it's really cool. But due to the budget issue, or due to the x x issues, we never get a chance to play around with that.
So T3Terminal has the products we have tried, and it's really working well. So they migrated from x CMS to TYPO3.
Me: Aaah
Sanjay: So that is the biggest achievement. And that's the one thing I would like to highlight - T3Terminal is remarkable. Unfortunately, it is not getting that much...
Because my plan was that we will get more vendors, people will connect together and have something and people will buy something which would help TYPO3
Me: So more awareness on it, that it exists and it's there to serve the people that use TYPO3 and to get more people into TYPO3.

Last Words From Sanjay

Me: Any last words before I let you go Sanjay?
Sanjay: I want to request everyone who is working with TYPO3, please do your best to give something back to the community.
Because that is how open source works. Because, you know, that's always happened to almost all the open-source products that people get a lot of things from from that product.
But when giving back to the community, they always hold back or are less aware or, or maybe it's about ethics.
So I just request that whoever is working with TYPO3 and getting good business, try your best to give back in any form.
It's not about money. It's not that you need to donate something, there are a lot of ways to contribute. Just education, writing a blog, helping the people, sponsoring something or someone who is working hard in the TYPO3 community.
That is my personal request that in any way try to give one or 2% of your time or resource back.
It will give the next - that is how TYPO3 works - because there are a lot of ethical people who are there and they are really doing their best and personally, they need it. I think it's about all the people that should come to that stage and give their contribution.

Thank You Sanjay

Me: I won't keep you for long, Sanjay, thank you so much. This has been very insightful getting to talk to someone who actually uses the CMS I was learning about, and how they integrate it into their business and delight. So thank you so much for this. I will share the link for the article when it's done. Sanjay: Okay, that's really nice. Thanks a lot, James. It's really nice to talk with you and let's stay connected. Me: Absolutely Sanjay: Okay, goodbye and namaste Me: Namaste

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My Takeaways From Talking With Sanjay

• Community and giving back is important.
• Where possible, create opportunities rather than looking elsewhere for them.
• With a good team you can accomplish a lot.

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Thank you, Sanjay for taking the time out of your day to sit down with me

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