Inquiry
A home for strange questions: post one, answer others, and add sources.
What it does
A place for questions without one right answer: thought experiments, odd facts and things people have always wondered about. You can browse questions, answer, discuss in threads, cite sources and ask your own.
- Question of the day, a random “Surprise me” question, and Explore with search, topics and sorting.
- Answers and details support Markdown and math. The asker can mark a favourite answer.
- One reaction only, “I’ve wondered this too”, which counts shared curiosity rather than correctness.
- Reporting and a moderation view, using demo accounts.
My contribution
I designed and built the prototype, including the interface, the demo data layer, the sample content and the tests. Every commit in the repository is mine.
Challenges and decisions
A browser-only demo breaks in ways a server doesn’t: storage can be full, blocked, out of date or changed in another tab.
The interface talks to a single repository interface that returns typed results for every action, and the demo implementation behind it validates inputs with Zod, writes all-or-nothing and recovers from corrupted storage. The tradeoff is more code than a demo strictly needs, but a real backend can replace the demo layer without rewriting the screens.
Current limitations
- No shared data or real accounts: nobody else sees what you post.
- Pages render in the browser, so there is no server-rendered content yet.
- Search is a simple word match.
Possible next steps
- Connect a real database behind the existing repository interface, with the same rules enforced on the server.
- Real sign-in, and server-rendered question pages with link previews.