Answers to Answers

A capstone project that outlived the class

In 2014 I went to Nashville Software School to learn to build the things I had been trying to hire other people to build. The capstone project I turned in was called Answers to Answers. On Monday morning an automated mailer sent one question to a small group. Everybody answered on their own. On Friday morning at ten, everyone’s answer was revealed to everyone else at once.

I ran it with my family. My dad, my mom, my sisters. The question would be something plain, like who was your favorite school teacher, and my dad would write something enormous, and somebody else would write two lines that were better. We did it for a year, a question a week, and then we all just kind of stopped. Life did what life does.

The thing is that it never went away. It is the same Rails application, on the same database, and my family’s answers are still sitting in it. 227 answers, from a circle of twelve, starting in 2014. I did not migrate them or reconstruct them from an export. Nobody had to. They were just there, the way a shoebox in a closet is there.

That is the whole reason this is back. My father wrote a letter to his mother every week for as long as I can remember, until she passed in 2018. He is still writing - to his brothers and sisters now. That habit produced a record of my childhood he never set out to produce. Letters are not going to be the medium for my generation. The impulse is the same, and it needs a form that survives the way that shoebox did.

So I picked the app back up, modernized the backend, and built the iPhone app it always wanted to be. It went on the App Store today.

What it does

One question goes out to the whole circle on a weekly rhythm. Everyone answers on their own, and while the question is open nobody can read anybody else’s answer. That part matters more than it sounds. When the question closes, all the answers become readable at the same moment, so nobody is echoing the person who answered first. Your dad tells the blizzard story his way. Your sister corrects him. Your kid says something nobody saw coming, and it all lands together.

Answers do not scroll away the way a group chat does. Every answered question goes into the circle’s archive, grouped by year. That is the part you cannot go back and build later. The answers exist because a question showed up that week and somebody you love replied to it.

Anybody in the circle can put a question in the queue, which is how it worked in 2014 and the best questions were always the ones a family member wrote. There are also curated tracks if you would rather not start from a blank page, and they cover four parts of a life: your family, your partner, yourself, and your children. The last one is an interview, where you choose the questions and somebody else answers them. Interviewing a grandparent runs on exactly the same machinery as interviewing a four-year-old about dinosaurs.

The app IPHONE · APP STORE · SHIPPING

• A push when the question opens, and a push when the digest is ready. A question runs for most of the week, closes, and the digest follows. Notifications are optional and the app works fine without them.
• Answer in your own voice, literally. Record a voice answer and it stands on its own, no typing required. The transcription happens on your phone, so the recording never goes to a transcription company.
• Photos. Attach a picture to an answer. Sometimes the photo is the answer.
• The archive, in your pocket. Your circle’s answered questions, grouped by year, with the voices on each one.
• Every kind of circle, started in the app. A family circle, an interview where you ask and someone else answers, or a private solo track. No trip to the website to set one up.

The web, so nobody gets left out

The app is the good experience. It is not the requirement, and that is deliberate, because the person whose answers you want most is often the person least likely to install anything.

Everything works in a browser. And a relative who has accepted their invitation can answer by replying to the question email, exactly the way the 2014 version worked. Their words land in the digest next to everybody else’s, and nobody in the circle can tell which channel an answer came in on. Several people in the original family circle have never used it any other way.

This is the piece I refuse to break. A family archive with a hole in it where your grandmother should be is not an archive.

Private by construction

Circles are invitation-only. There is no public archive, no sharing feature that puts an answer on the open web, no discovery, no feed, and no way for a stranger to find what your family wrote. Circles cannot see each other.

While a question is open, your answer is yours alone. When it closes, it is readable by the people in that circle and by nobody else.

There are no ads. Nothing is sold to anybody, there are no data brokers, and you are not tracked across other companies’ apps and websites. The iPhone app contains no analytics kit and no crash-reporting kit from another company - it talks to my servers and to Apple’s notification service, and to nothing else. Your answers are never used to train a machine-learning model.

Voice answers are transcribed on your own device. The phone turns the recording into text and sends the text along with the audio, so no third party ever hears it.

You can delete your account from inside the app, in Profile, and it takes your answers, transcripts, photos, audio, and sign-in records with it. The full privacy policy says all of this at greater length, including the parts that are awkward, like what happens to a circle you started if you leave it.

Get Answers to Answers

Start a circle on the web in a browser, or get the iPhone app. They are the same account and the same archive.

Start on the web →

The first question is the hard one. After that it arrives on its own every week, which is the only reason mine lasted a year the first time and the whole reason I wanted it back.