Week in Review: Real Progress Tracking, a Better Teacher Hub, and Notifications That Go Somewhere
140 commits, mostly on the boring but necessary layer between features and actual usability: progress tracking across grammar hubs, a cleaner teacher workspace, and Scribe flows that make more sense.
140 commits this week. Busy in a very systems-y way.
Not “look at this shiny new homepage” busy. More “now the product stops making teachers do detective work” busy.
english-exercises.org
The biggest thing here was real progress tracking across the grammar hubs.
I extended the progress system to all 18 hub pages, fixed the exercise_module conflict behaviour that was breaking completion status, and made stats visible to everyone instead of treating basic progress information like a members-only nightclub.
Anonymous users still get a sign-up nudge, but it’s subtle now. The product should be useful first. The account prompt comes after.
I also fixed notification clicks so they actually navigate to the notifications page, added teacher profile data to messages, and removed a couple of half-finished pages that had no business sitting in public navigation.
If a thing is not ready, it shouldn’t cosplay as ready.
Firstly Academy
Firstly got a proper teacher homepage at /teacher, a main writing hub page, and a much better Scribe workflow.
The Scribe improvements were the sort teachers notice instantly:
- accent-insensitive student search
- email search support
- student-first recording flow
- auto-title behaviour that saves a bit of mental friction every single lesson
Tiny cuts removed from the teacher day. That’s the goal.
There were a couple of supporting changes in Teachers-Scribe-Dev too, mostly around invitation endpoints and resolving Clerk IDs more cleanly. Again: not dramatic, but the kind of thing that stops admin flows feeling cursed.
Lesson Planning
I also added a full 10-lesson integrated syllabus for one of my advanced students in the lesson-planning repo.
That matters because the product side and the teaching side keep feeding each other now. I build something in the apps, then I immediately feel whether it helps actual teaching or not.
What This Week Was Really About
Progress has to be visible.
Teacher tools have to reduce thinking, not add more of it.
Notifications have to go somewhere useful when you click them. Mad concept, I know.
There wasn’t one big cinematic launch this week. Just a lot of work that made the whole ecosystem feel more adult.
I’ll take that.