Week 7 was the midterm evaluation week. I walked my mentors through the app end to end - browse, detail, search, offline, and the zoom viewer - and everything I’d committed to for the midterm was in place. Alongside the review, I paid off the one piece of technical debt I’d been carrying since Week 3.
The id and author debt: Back in Week 3 the tablet detail screen had a compromise I flagged at the time - the feed didn’t expose an id or an author, so the app used the tablet’s image URL as its identity and showed a placeholder author name. That worked, but it was fragile: the image filenames contain apostrophes and spaces (nabopolassar'sinscriptions03.jpg), they were being used as route parameters and list keys, and two entries sharing an image would have collided silently.
My backend MR on the framework, !1223, merged and deployed this week, so the feed now returns both fields. I verified it against production before touching the client: 527 entries, every id present, unique and an integer, and every author non-empty.
The migration: This is the “one-line change” I promised in Week 3, and it turned out to be six files rather than one. Tablet.id became a real id instead of a URL, the fetch maps item.id, the lookup hook matches on id, the detail screen reads an id route param, and both list keyExtractors and both card components switched over. What I hadn’t appreciated is that TypeScript caught none of it - url is still a legitimate string field on the type, so every one of those places compiled cleanly while quietly keying by the wrong thing. They had to be found by grep, not by the compiler. So a rename is only type-safe once the old field actually goes away.
The visible payoff is small but real - the author badge now shows the actual scholar who wrote the entry (Englund, Robert K., Wagensonner, Klaus) instead of a generic CDLI placeholder, and tablets are addressed by a stable id that survives an image being replaced.
Milestone 2 achieved: Core App. Browse, detail, search, swipe-free navigation and the zoom viewer all work end to end and offline, and the app now runs on the real feed contract rather than a workaround.
| Area | What I did | MR |
|---|---|---|
| Backend | id + author added to the cdli-tablet feed, merged and deployed |
!1223 |
| Migration | Switched identity from image URL to feed id across types, api, hooks, routes and list keys |
!3 |
| Attribution | Real author names on the detail screen, placeholder removed | !3 |
| Midterm | Demoed the full core flow to mentors | - |