Week in Review: Subject-Verb Agreement, Safari Fixes, and a Homepage That Wobbles Less

112 commits this week. Publicly, it looked like I shipped a new grammar module.

Under the surface, it was a lot of “why is Safari like this” and “why is this layout jumping about”.

english-exercises.org

The headline feature was a full Subject-Verb Agreement module:

• 15 exercises
• 300 questions
• another grammar topic properly live instead of living as a note in a roadmap

At the same time I cleaned up a bunch of presentation issues:

• Cumulative Layout Shift fixes across 17 hub pages
• discussion tabs matched to the newer module pattern
• mobile search button hidden where it was causing overflow
• homepage copy tightened up
• a few 3D icons added so the visuals have a bit more life

I like weeks where content and polish move together. Adding more exercises is good. Adding more exercises to a site that feels calmer is better.

Firstly Academy

Firstly was mostly an audio and Scribe week.

I fixed Safari audio repetition issues on iOS, added extra safety around playback, and cleaned up a few edge cases that were making repetition less trustworthy than it should be.

Teacher Scribe also got a round of polish:

• better email styling
• editable greeting behaviour
• student error field in the vocabulary card editor
• extraction prompt aligned more closely with the gold-standard version

I also removed some unnecessary flashcard tagging that was just clutter.

The Useful Kind of Boring

This was not a big launch week.

It was a “make the app less twitchy” week.

That means layout stability, audio stability, cleaner email output, fewer weird labels, less visual wobble. The sort of work users rarely praise because they only notice it when it’s missing.

Fair enough.

Still counts.