Git Racer
Race your friends, race famous developers, and turn your GitHub contributions into a competitive sport.
Pick any GitHub username and we pull actual commit counts from GitHub. Your real totals, not starting from zero.
Features include 1v1 head-to-head duels, goal-based challenges, league tiers, streak tracking, contribution graphs, shareable race links, and social sharing across Twitter, LinkedIn, Discord, Slack, and more.
Project Purpose & Goal
Wanted to make open-source contributions feel competitive and social. No global leaderboard — the focus is on personal, meaningful 1v1 races against friends, colleagues, or anyone on GitHub.
Stack & Explanation
Monorepo with React 19 and React Router v7 on the frontend, Hono as a lightweight REST API on the backend, Drizzle ORM with PostgreSQL for data, Three.js for a 3D Hyperspeed landing animation, and Vite for dev tooling. Deployed on Vercel with serverless functions and cron jobs for daily GitHub data ingestion.
Problems & Thought Process
Blending multiple GitHub data sources. Accurate commit counts required pulling from GitHub Archive, GraphQL, and the Events API — each with different coverage, latency, and rate limits. Also handled cold-start crashes with @vercel/og image generation and StrictMode double-mount issues with the Three.js Hyperspeed animation.
Lessons Learned
Building a social product around real data is harder than building the features — the data pipeline (ingestion, deduplication, accuracy) ended up being the core challenge, not the UI.