Soul in Motion — 6:15 PM | 2026-09-11

Description and use

The author resolved intermittent failures in a voice assistant and fixed UI/UX regressions in the Living‑Books mobile web app, achieving stable performance on real devices.

Problem

The voice‑assistant ‘Friday’ on the author’s phone intermittently returned empty responses, and the Living‑Books app suffered UI/UX regressions on real devices.

Outcome

The assistant’s reliability improved, and the Living‑Books app now performs smoothly on mobile devices, eliminating previous UI/UX regressions.

Workflow

• 1. Diagnosed assistant issue by inspecting intent‑handling code and adding guard clauses and detailed logging.
• 2. Re‑architected command‑handling loop to tighten state machine logic.
• 3. Built and deployed a new Docker image to staging.
• 4. Tested on a real phone, identified a race condition in audio loading.
• 5. Deferred audio requests until layout callbacks fired (Android) and fixed similar iOS logic.
• 6. Tested again to confirm stability.
• 7. Addressed Living‑Books bugs: replaced ScrollView with FlatList, updated audio player initialization, moved font loading to a worker and used font‑display: swap.
• 8. Performed real‑device tests to confirm UI/UX fixes.
• 9. Took deliberate breaks to maintain focus.
• 10. Reflected on progress and documented lessons learned.

Evidence

I tightened the logic, added guard clauses for missing context, and introduced a more granular logging strategy to surface the exact point of failure.

Source

The culprit turned out to be a race condition in the audio‑loading pipeline.

Source

I replaced it with a FlatList that lazily renders items and added momentum scrolling.

Source