Week in Review: Business English, Router Surgery, and Deleting 13,400 Lines
91 commits split between public-facing Business English work on english-exercises.org and a fairly aggressive clean-up of Firstly Academy's routing and auth layer.
91 commits this week and the two halves of it could not have felt more different.
One half was public-facing and nicely legible. The other half was me opening up Firstly Academy and doing route surgery.
english-exercises.org
I finished all 6 Business English sub-worlds and pushed the SEO/GEO layer further too.
That meant:
- answer capsules
- statistics
- FAQ sections with schema
- crawlable phrase banks
- citation fixes
- cleaner navigation
There was also a sweep of grammar content:
- Verb To Be
- Compound Words
- Whatever / Whoever / Wherever / However
And I removed some old WhatsApp CTAs that no longer made sense. The product is getting clearer about what it actually is, which is always healthier than leaving every old experiment lying around.
Firstly Academy
This was the heavy internal week.
I migrated Fluency Gym, flashcards, and grammar practice into cleaner Router modules, standardised auth patterns, fixed unauthenticated TTS endpoints, fixed Essay Lab user resolution, and deleted about 13,400 lines of dead or outdated code in the process.
There is something deeply satisfying about deleting code when you know exactly why it deserves to go.
Messy route files are expensive. Weird auth patterns are expensive. Dead code is expensive. The invoice just arrives later.
Lesson Planning
Lesson-planning ticked along in the background with roadmap updates across a bunch of students, which is increasingly the steady pulse of the whole system.
The Split
The glamorous half of the week was Business English.
The necessary half was routers, auth, and code removal.
Both matter. One gets screenshots. The other stops the app turning into soup.