About FOKIQ — built by Baljeet Aulakh at Blue Snow Developers LLC

Who built FOKIQ

FOKIQ is built by Baljeet Aulakh — a Cleveland-based software engineer and the founder of Blue Snow Developers LLC. The path here started at Cleveland State University, ran through industrial controls work at Rockwell Automation, then through ed-tech engineering at Participate, and eventually landed at the founder's bench. Across fourteen years and seventy-plus production technologies, the through-line has been the same: build interfaces that make hard ideas feel reachable.

FOKIQ is the bootstrapped solo product that came out of that itch. Every line of code, every puzzle algorithm, every cognitive-science citation, every illustration, and every commit on this repository was authored by one founder. There is no design agency, no outsourced QA team, no advisory board. The trade-off is honest — slower than a funded lab, more opinionated than a committee, and far more durable than something engineered to flip. The longer-form personal story is on baljeetaulakh.com, and the broader portfolio sits at Blue Snow Developers.

Why FOKIQ exists

The brain-training category is dominated by subscription apps that quietly charge thirteen-to-fifteen dollars a month for what should be a public utility. The result is a strange shape: most adults will never train pattern recognition, working memory, or spatial reasoning past the school years, simply because the on-ramp is gated. FOKIQ is the alternative — a daily ritual that takes a few minutes, costs nothing, and produces a shareable identity card at the end.

The Wordle insight quietly powers everything we ship. One daily puzzle, the same for everyone, with a tiny social-currency payload at the finish. Lumosity-style adaptive practice can never produce a comparable score because every player solves a different deck on a different day; we wanted the simpler thing that everyone in a family group chat could rally around. The longer comparison lives at why FOKIQ.

The six-domain framing — pattern recognition, working memory, spatial reasoning, processing speed, logical reasoning, and verbal reasoning — is deliberate. Single-axis puzzles cap your identity at the puzzle. Multi-axis training plotted on a radar gives you a profile, and a profile is what people want to share.

How FOKIQ is built

The stack is intentionally boring so the product can stay sharp. The web application is SvelteKit 2 with Svelte 5 runes, rendered on Vercel. Heavy puzzle surfaces use PixiJS 8 for deterministic 60fps canvas work; the lighter UI is plain DOM. Persistence runs on Supabase for the leaderboard, streak archive, and optional cloud sync; everything else lives in localStorage in your browser. Error monitoring is Sentry; aggregate usage analytics is PostHog with strict opt-in.

The cognitive-science layer is the part we are slowest about. The Cognition Bible is sixty primary-source citations across the six domains, mapped one-to-one to the puzzle types you actually play. The cognitive-science glossary defines the terms our tips reference; the Brain Types hub maps the most common MindMap radar shapes to named identities. Every domain has its own cornerstone: pattern recognition, working memory, spatial reasoning, processing speed, logical reasoning, and verbal reasoning.

The daily ships at midnight UTC and is deterministically generated from a daily seed — the leaderboard is comparing apples to apples. After your run you can replay practice rounds at today's daily, or jump to the Brain Type quiz, Brain Age calculator, or one of the six standalone tests like memory test, reaction time, pattern recognition, spatial reasoning, and logic puzzle test.

How FOKIQ makes money

Today, zero. Daily play is free, the archive is free, the brain-type identity is free, the cornerstone editorial is free, and there are no banner ads, interstitials, or dark-pattern upgrade nags. The only revenue levers on the roadmap are optional Brain-Type merch (print-on-demand t-shirts, posters, and stickers tied to the radar archetypes) and pay-what-you-want supporter tipping for readers who want to keep the lights on. Both are opt-in. Neither gates a single puzzle.

This is the bootstrapped trade. We grow at the speed organic search and word-of-mouth let us grow, and we never have to design against the user's attention because we never had to underwrite a venture round. If that ever changes, you will see it change in plain sight — on the homepage, in the footer, and on this page.

How FOKIQ protects you

FOKIQ runs by default with no account required. Your daily history, streak, MindMap, and Brain Type sit in localStorage on the device you are reading this on. No login, no email, no fingerprinting. Cloud sync is opt-in for the people who want their streak to follow them across devices, and even there we never sell, share, or rent your data — see the privacy policy for the full data-handling table.

There are no third-party advertising trackers and no social-pixel beacons. The only analytics surface is aggregate usage telemetry through PostHog (opt-in, no replay, no PII), and Sentry for error monitoring (stack traces and request paths, never puzzle answers or user content). The terms of service spells out what is fair use and what isn't, in the plainest English we can manage.

If you ever want your data exported or removed from the cloud copy, the streak page has an export button for the local history, and the contact emails below cover deletion requests.

Open milestones

A real, plain-English snapshot of where the product is — last refreshed 2026-05-06.

• Cognition Bible — 60 primary-source questions across the six domains, one entry per puzzle type. Live at /tips.
• Glossary — Tier-2 cornerstone terms plus Tier-1 cognitive-bias entries, all linking to the relevant domain hub. Live at /glossary.
• Brain Types — ten archetype cornerstones mapping radar shapes to shareable identities. Live at /brain-types.
• Six cognitive-domain hubs — one per axis on the MindMap radar. Live at /pattern-recognition, /working-memory, /spatial-reasoning, /processing-speed, /logical-reasoning, and /verbal-reasoning.
• Daily play — live since 2026-01-29, deterministic seed at midnight UTC, full archive at /leaderboard.
• First organic players — the global leaderboard seated its first organically acquired players the week of 2026-05-04. The ledger is public.
• Roadmap — versus mode, group challenges, the long-form blog, and a deeper /faq are next on the bench.