Italian Learning App - Current State

Over the past several weeks I've been building out the Italian language learning section of this site, and I wanted to document the major features that have shipped so far.

🚀 Deploy Pipeline Stability

The production server was experiencing random crashes - traced to a race condition in the GitHub Actions deploy script. The old flow was:

1. pm2 stop md-blog
2. fuser -k 5000/tcp (force-kill anything on the port)
3. pm2 start server.js

The problem: after the stop command, pm2's built-in auto-restart would sometimes grab port 5000 before step 3 could bind to it, causing an EADDRINUSE crash loop.

Fix: replaced the three-step sequence with a single atomic restart:

pm2 restart md-blog --update-env || pm2 start server.js --name "md-blog"

No more crashing.

🎙 Gufo AI Voice Tutor - VAD Tuning

Gufo is the in-app Italian conversation partner powered by ElevenLabs. One issue: in environments with ambient noise (a fan, background conversation, etc.), the voice activity detection (VAD) would keep the microphone "open" indefinitely — Gufo would never think you'd stopped talking.

Fix: passed explicit VAD overrides when starting the ElevenLabs session:

overrides: {
  agent: {
    turn: {
      turn_detection: {
        mode: 'server_vad',
        silence_duration_ms: 700,
        threshold: 0.55,
        prefix_padding_ms: 300,
      }
    }
  }
}

The default ElevenLabs threshold is around 0.3 - too sensitive for any real room. Bumping it to 0.55 with a 700ms silence window means Gufo reliably detects end-of-turn without being triggered constantly by background noise.

📱 Mobile Navigation - Leaderboard & Review

The sidebar navigation (with all sections: Vocab, Verbs, Grammar Quiz, Sentences, Reading, Idioms, Reference, Speak, Review, Leaderboard) is hidden on mobile screens. Mobile users were relying on a bottom navigation bar that only had six items - and Leaderboard and Review weren't among them.

Fix: replaced the least-used bottom nav item ("Reference", rarely accessed on mobile) with dedicated entries for Review and Leaderboard:

Each new item also got its own active-state colour — purple for Review, gold for Leaderboard — consistent with the rest of the hybrid theme.

What's Been Built Overall

For anyone catching up, here's the full feature set currently live:

• Vocabulary SRS — 800+ words across 12 categories, flashcard review with SM-2 spaced repetition
• Verb Conjugation Drills — present, past, future tenses; irregular verbs flagged
• Grammar Quiz — multiple-choice grammar questions with topic filtering
• Sentence Exercises — fill-in-the-blank and translation practice
• Reading Passages — graded Italian texts with comprehension questions
• Idiom Explorer — common Italian idioms with usage examples
• Grammar Reference — quick-reference conjugation tables and rules
• Gufo AI Tutor — real-time Italian conversation via ElevenLabs voice AI
• SRS Review System — due-card queue across vocab and grammar, SM-2 scheduling
• XP + Levels + Streaks — gamified progress tracking persisted to the database
• Achievements — unlockable badges for milestones
• Daily Goals — configurable XP targets with progress bars
• Leaderboard — weekly XP rankings across all users

All of this lives at /italian.