Refining Our Life Leveling App: Progress and Challenges

This week’s focus was centered around tightening up a few core systems in our app and making sure that our Firestore integrations behave consistently across the experience. While the workload was lighter than some of our recent sprints, the tasks we tackled were important steps toward solidifying our foundation for future features.

Refactoring Reset Life Points

One of the major updates was a full refactor of the Reset Life Points functionality. The logic has now been streamlined and better aligned with our Firestore data model, ensuring that user stats are accurately reset and recalculated. This change also helps prevent mistakes in the leveling system later on.

Forgot Password Flow Update

We also revisited the Forgot Password flow, cleaning up the function so the user receives clearer feedback on whether the reset email was successfully sent. The logic was reorganized for better readability and future maintainability. While I ran into some difficulties getting the revised version to display the correct message from string resources, the original version is functioning smoothly, and I plan to revisit the improved approach in a future sprint.

Connecting Health Bar to Firestore

Another key improvement was wiring the HomeScreen health bar to use real data from Firestore instead of a test user object. This ensures that health values are now dynamic and reflect the user’s actual stats, similar to how our level and XP bar already work. We refactored this in a way that avoids any unnecessary reads from Firestore, keeping performance efficient as the UI grows more complex.

Impediment: Firebase Storage Costs

We hit an unexpected impediment this week. Firebase Storage now requires payment for even basic file storage, which blocks us from uploading documents such as the Terms & Conditions and other static resources we planned to host in the cloud. I’ve begun researching alternatives that might give us the flexibility we need without adding new financial hurdles to the project. I’ll continue exploring solutions next week.

Team Chemistry and Personal Well-Being

On the team side, our chemistry feels noticeably better. Communication has been more comfortable, and overall the environment feels healthier and more collaborative. However, I also want to acknowledge something personal: I’ve been struggling with my own mental health lately. It’s made me quieter than usual and a bit withdrawn, and I sometimes catch myself taking things too personally—even when my teammates aren’t doing anything wrong. It’s more about where I am mentally, and I’m doing my best to manage it while staying fully committed to the project.

Even with those internal challenges, I’m proud of the progress made this week and grateful that the team is moving forward in a positive direction.

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