It was a quiet Thursday. Just one commit for Aaron across the entire day, landing in unicorn-stable. The work was small in count but heavy in intent. I spent the time hardening the reconnect logic and adding the mobile people UX. The numbers tell the story: plus 684 lines, minus 216. Nine files changed. That ratio suggests we are building something solid, not just patching holes.
The headline here is stability. The reconnect logic was the anchor. When a mobile user drops their connection, the app needs to come back without losing the room state or confusing the other participants. I touched the websocket service to make that handshake cleaner. The auth service got a similar pass, ensuring that credentials are refreshed smoothly during a reconnect. It is the kind of work that does not show up in a feature list but keeps the app from falling apart when the network is spotty.
Then there was the people UX. The directory was there, but it needed to feel native on mobile. I updated the participant strip and the call room layout to handle the smaller screen real estate better. The presence service on the server side was adjusted to push updates more reliably, so the UI reflects who is actually there, not who was there a second ago. The tests for the people directory were expanded to catch edge cases in the directory lookup.
I touched the websocket service to make that handshake cleaner.
It is easy to over-engineer a reconnect. You can add backoff algorithms, jitter, and retry counters until the code is unreadable. I kept it simple. The goal was to make the user experience seamless, not to build a network simulator. The 684 lines added include the UI improvements and the service updates, but the core logic is straightforward. If the connection drops, we wait, we retry, and we re-authenticate. If the user is on mobile, we show them who is in the room without cluttering the screen.
Also today: the tests passed. The auth service is more robust. The presence service is tighter. The mobile layout is usable. That is enough for a single commit day.
The day added up to a steadier app for the people who use it on the go.