interview

Please give a brief introduction of yourself.

I am the co-founder and director at Josh Software, Pune. I have an engineering degree in Computer Science from PICT, Pune. In my 10 years in the IT industry, I have worked in companies like Symantec, Zensar and Cybage before starting Josh 3 years ago.
My technical knowledge spans from various languages functional languages and scripting languagesbut my current love is Ruby On Rails. As with the company name ‘Josh’, I have a lot of passion for new and emerging technologies. Our company works almost exclusively in Ruby on Rails and thats what gives us the edge!

What are your contributions to FOSS projects ?

From Josh, we FOSS contributions ranges from systems level frameworks to Ruby On Rails products. ‘Virtual Fabric Manager’ is a C / Python based management framework for bridging Ethernet, Fibre Channel and Infiniband between each other. This cutting edge ‘network virtualization framework’ can easily be integrated with enterprise switches deployed in data centers.
Our FOSS contribution at the other end of the spectrum has been eJosh – an open source Rails based CMS targeted towards jump starting non-IT companies and professionals. India is waking up to the concept of Internet branding and marketing and a good ’search engine optimized’ website is a great start – eJosh is extremely easy and does not require ANY prior technical knowledge

What will your workshop be, exactly ?

I will first outline the problems faced by most non-IT companies (in Manufacturing, consulting services and other SMEs). These companies are aware of brand-marketing on the internet but are weary of web-designing, skeptical about Internet marketing and simply lost on how to keep your company online information updated.

I will then specify some techniques used by Companies making a mark by their online campaigns – SEO, Social media marketing and gaining online traction. I will also explain why this is extremely important.
Then I will demonstrate the eJosh product – site configuration, user management, site layouts, page creation, navigation links and basic concepts of introducing crawlers. Then I shall explain about creating categories and tags and how it helps in SEO.

After this, if time permits and people are not yet sleeping or dazed , I shall explain how Josh can help in developing the pages with custom requirements. Plugins like employee management, leave management, time-sheets shall bring us to the the future potential of eJosh development roadmap. I will then conclude the session after some questions and answers.

What do you hope to accomplish by conducting this talk? What do you expect ?

I hope that the talk will help non-IT professionals and companies get onto the internet. I do hope to get the techies interested in Ruby On Rails and contribute to eJosh.

What prompted you to develop a new CMS instead of re-using existing ones or improving existing ones ?

The idea started when we wanted to build our own site and keep it up-to-date. We evaluated exiting CMS solutions and found almost each one lacking in something and really good in some other area. Ruby On Rails was the obvious choice because of development and deployment timeframe. We looked at some of the existing systems – RadiantCMS, BrowerCMS, Drupal, Joomla, wordpress and also some frameworks like LifeRay and Alfresco to name a few! We realized that we either are needed just a little more or got so much more that we would use only 50% of the features!

That got us thinking – how about if we make a CMS which has inherent SEO capabilities, simple to use, Rich Text editor, DRY (don’t repeat yourself) principle, cross-referencing, tag-clouds, potential to add custom coded pages, themes etc. and realized that we may just have a product, which solves a lot of peoples problems!

Which features of eJosh, makes it stand apart from other CMS ?

Cross-referencing page-sections, simple site configuration, plugin support, no prior coding required. Customized layouts and themes (we can still do a better job), inherent SEO. Most importantly, it can be a hosted setup or a standalone setup. Tag-clouds, option for custom ruby coded pages.

What made you choose RoR over other languages ?

Ruby is a pure object oriented scripting language and Rails is an excellent platform for web-deployment. Its a natural choice

What’s the most important piece of advice you would give to people making there first FOSS contribution ?

Make it !! Ever so often, we do some really good work that can help a lot of people but we are lazy to contribute back. Either this or we try to contribute ‘the best piece of code’. The reality is that there is NO best code, so contribute thick and fast and the community supports you. eJosh is by no means the best CMS today– but with FOSS community support, it can get there.

Have you enjoyed previous editions of gnunify ?

Unfortunately, I did not attend earlier gnuify events — its really sad. However, its never too late. I do hope to make up for it this time. I am looking forward to the workshop and the talk. Thank you GNUnify for this event!