Day one: a typing race for up to four players

The work: 22 March 2026 · Written 1 November 2026 · Entry 1 of 17

The first commit of this project is dated 22 March 2026, and its message says what the idea was: a type racer website that supports up to four players per room. Everything since then grew from that small idea: people in one room, one piece of text, and the first to type it wins.

The idea

Typing practice is usually a lonely exercise: you type a paragraph, you see a number, and you close the tab. A race changes that. When other people are typing the same text at the same moment, the number on the screen is no longer abstract, and you want to type a little faster than the last time.

The first version was a plain race. A player joined a room, saw the same prompt as the others, and watched everyone's progress bar move as they typed. The room held four players at most. That limit is still in the game today, because a progress bar for each player stays easy to read with four lanes and a small screen.

What it was built with

The first version had a React front end and an ASP.NET Core back end with a real-time connection (SignalR) to keep the players of a room in step. The server kept the state of a room in memory, which kept it simple: no database was needed to run a race.

That early structure explains some choices you can still see in the site. Solo practice works without any connection, because it needs no other player. Match mode connects only when you press the button, because that is when other people are needed.

What was still missing

• No accounts: scores were not saved.
• No leaderboard.
• No on-screen keyboard for phones.
• Only one kind of game: the race itself.

The next entries in this log tell how each of those gaps was filled, in the order it happened.