I discovered a blogpost on Buster’s Rickshaw about religions / cosmologies. The post had choose-your-own-adventure style questions & answers to help the reader clarify their beliefs about reality. Since most of the questions were yes/no choices, I saw an opportunity to put it into a flowchart and then an application instead of a blogpost article.

Description

This type of boolean logic works very well for flowcharts, one of my favorite tools of all time, so I asked the author if I could make a flowchart app using his content. I used a Blazor WASM Standalone app, so I could host the published app on my existing Cloudways server. There is no server logic – everything is downloaded and executed in the browser.

Inspiration

I built this app for two reasons. Firstly, when I came across Buster’s blogpost, I was inspired to learn more about the various cosmologies he had listed, and how he defined each one. It’s like doing a personality test – a little self-indulgence, while maybe learning a thing or two about how you think. It gave me some more clarity into my own beliefs.

The second reason I built this was how Buster laid out his logic. Most questions were YES or NO choices, making them boolean. Others were more of a ‘pick one of the following’. Both of these types of questions can be easily modeled in a flowchart, and it’s one of the tools I use whenever I start to solve a problem – from obtaining a Swedish driving license to drafting website logic. So, I felt I had to apply flowchart logic here as well.

A good flowchart has two types of paths: boolean (YES/NO) and multiple choice (Pick one of the following, Option A / Option B / Option C…). I see badly designed flowcharts all the time, where one box leads to many others asking all sorts of different questions. The Journeys app is an example of solid logic which minimizes ambiguity and choices, resulting in good user experience.

Technologies Used

• ASP.NET / C# / Blazor WASM
• Jetbrains IDE
• Cloudways hosting
• Subdomain DNS
• Draw.io (for planning)