2020

Journal

Rethinking the pricing page

In needing to redesign the pricing page for the new account section, I decide to rethink the structure of Cushion’s existing plans.

Journal

A dev’s troubleshooting journey

An innocent bug report unfolds into a roller coaster ride of a troubleshooting journey.

Journal

Scaffolding the account page

As I begin building Cushion’s new account page, I start by scaffolding a static version of it and building the components it requires.

Journal

Redesigning the account section for SCA with Stripe Checkout

With SCA regulation going into effect at the end of the year, I prioritize migrating to Stripe Checkout, which means redesigning the account section.

Journal

Designing a new layout system

After years and years of incrementally tweaking the design of Cushion, I take a holistic look at the layout system.

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Redesigning the blog

After redesigning Cushion’s homepage, I take the next step in migrating to Contentful by rethinking the blog.

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Animating the new homepage hero

To keep my mind busy while dealing with a tough time, I distract myself with Cushion’s new homepage animation.

Journal

Responsive images for different layouts

While building Cushion’s new homepage, I go the extra mile to swap out better-fitting images for different breakpoints.

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A flexible way of using Nuxt.js with Contentful CMS

After migrating Cushion’s changelog to Contentful, I move onto the homepage, where I narrow in on an approach to compose pages entirely in the CMS.

Journal

Migrating the changelog to the Contentful CMS

In my initial step towards migrating Cushion’s marketing site to Contentful, I start with the changelog.

Journal

Promoting invoicing to the main nav

I reworked the main nav to include invoicing, which was met with a wave of thanks from users.

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The next big rocks

After launching Cushion’s new onboarding, I detail the next few items on my to-do list, which for once are not new features.

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Onboarding is live

A weekend turned into a month, but Cushion’s new onboarding is finally live. Instead of focusing on the launch itself, I talk through my favorite part.

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Composable onboarding

To provide a more pleasant codebase for Future Jonnie to inherit, I restructure the onboarding to be composable and easily testable.

Journal

Writing my own utility methods

I decide to write a few utility methods myself, rather than relying on 3rd party library, and I’m glad I do.

Journal

Using a utility library vs building my own

Torn between adding a dependency for a utility method or writing it myself, I talk through the pros and cons of both approaches.

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A reminder to write

Determined to launch thew onboarding flow, I forgot to write for a week and it shows.

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The date picker component

Continuing my work on Cushion’s onboarding flow, I build a new and improved date picker component.

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Building components for the long run

With my recent work on Cushion’s new onboarding flow, I take a meandering walk through the new components I built for it that are all typed and tested.

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Investigating inflection points

Stepping back to look at Cushion’s growth over its entire lifetime reveals a crystal clear moment when everything went south.

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Recalibrating my estimates

I start working on the new onboarding flow, but quickly realize it won’t be a weekend project.

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A friendly onboarding flow

As a first stab at onboarding, I design a flow that includes myself asking questions, which hopefully provides a friendly intro to the app.

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Bringing back onboarding

In an attempt to ease people into the app rather than pushing them out of the airplane, I decide to bring back a proper onboarding flow.

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Rough sketches

After feeling reluctant to reveal any design progress, I decide to bite the bullet and share a few rough sketches—no matter how uncomfortable it feels.

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Flattening the nav

Continuing the idea of the single click, I talk through a potential path to flattening the nav from multiple layers down to one.

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Well, this is embarrassing

Browsing through Cushion, I realize something strange. As I troubleshoot the anomaly, I discover an embarrassing truth.

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Sending newsletters again

I sent my first Cushion newsletter in over a year and a half, which sounds crazy, but nonetheless, it feels great to send them again.

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Validating assumptions

Before diving into analytics, I decide to spend time writing database queries that could validate some of my assumptions using existing data.

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Intentional analytics

After building Cushion so far based purely on assumptions and intuition, I finally start to think about using analytics to help guide me.

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This app has good bones

A thought-provoking conversation leads me to realize that Cushion is still solid and worth iterating on, instead of restarting from scratch.

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Keeping API requests simple

After establishing a new guiding principle to keep API requests simple, I describe how I could refactor a complex view that relies on a heavy API request.