One question a week

The database behind the iPhone app I just put on the App Store has answers in it from 2014.

Not a copy of them. Not an export I re-imported into something new. The same rows, in the same Rails application, sitting there the whole time.

In 2014 I went to Nashville Software School to learn to build the thing I had spent the previous two years trying to get somebody else to build. I turned 35 during the program. The capstone project I handed in was called Answers to Answers, and it did one thing. Monday morning, an automated mailer sent a single question to a small group. Everybody answered on their own, either by replying to that email or on the web. Friday morning at ten, everyone’s answer was revealed to everyone else at once.

I ran it with my family. My parents, my sisters. The questions were plain ones, like who was your favorite school teacher. Then Friday would come, and there they all were, side by side.

My dad would write something enormous. Somebody else would write two lines that were better. Nobody could see anybody else’s answer while the question was open, so nobody echoed anybody.

We did that for about eighteen months. One question a week. And then we all just kind of stopped.

I could not tell you why. It just stopped being a thing that happened.

The answers stayed. 227 of them, from a circle of twelve. I have lost enough archives to other people’s shutdowns to know what that was worth. So they sat where they had always been, on a server I never got around to turning off.

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 brother and sisters now. Without ever meaning to, he documented my childhood. The small parts, the ones I do not remember, the person I was in the middle of becoming. Nobody in my family called that an archive. It was just the thing he did every week.

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 a shoebox in a closet survives.

I thought it would be much better if it were an app. So this spring I picked the thing back up. Same application, same database, same 227 answers. I modernized the backend, rebuilt the web side, and built the iPhone app it always wanted to be. The question arrives as a notification now instead of an email you were going to get to later. You can answer by talking. The reply-by-email path still works the way it did in 2014, because the person whose answers you want most is usually the person least likely to install anything.

It is on the App Store. I am using it in a circle with my partner and in a different circle with a friend group from high school.