Dev Log: May 15 Wrap-up

Overview

Today was a bit of a split personality day. I spent the morning wrestling with dependency management for my mobile side project and the afternoon digging through some legacy scheduler logic at work. It felt productive, even if some of it was just 'plumbing' work.

What I Worked On

Beefing up the mobile app

I finally sat down to get the Android side of my HomeAlone project in order. Most of the time was spent syncing up Capacitor plugins. I integrated biometric authentication and Bluetooth LE support. It’s one of those things where you add a few lines to a gradle file and pray the build doesn't explode, but thankfully, everything linked up correctly.

I also updated my Firebase security rules. I added a new node for a pump controller I'm working on. It’s basic auth != null stuff for now, but it’s necessary to keep things locked down before I start testing the hardware triggers. I also realized my .gitignore was a mess and was accidentally tracking some environment files, so I spent a few minutes cleaning that up to keep my API keys where they belong—off of GitHub.

Squashing scheduler bugs

Over on the work front, I had to dive into the scheduler service. We were having an issue where some alerts weren't being tagged with the correct event IDs, making it a nightmare to track them in the logs.

I had to go in and manually ensure the eventId was being passed correctly through the response handler. It's not the most glamorous code—mostly just mapping data from the scheduler's response to the alert system—but it's one of those "invisible" fixes that makes life a lot easier for the support team later on. I also took a look at how we’re generating download URLs for documents; it’s a bit brittle, but it works for now.

Sometimes you just have to hardcode an ID to get a feature over the finish line, but it always feels a little like a debt I'll have to pay back eventually.

Wrapping Up

Overall, a solid day. The mobile app is starting to feel more like a real piece of software now that it has actual security and hardware communication layers. Tomorrow, I’m hoping to actually test the Bluetooth connection with the physical sensors and see if I can get some data flowing. Catch you then.