Commit Crown

The Challenge

Two hard constraints had to coexist. GitHub's API caps at 5,000 requests per hour — naïve implementations exhaust the quota the moment a few users sync simultaneously. And because the entire competitive layer (leaderboards, raids, prestige rankings) depends on those stats, the data had to be tamper-proof from the client.

The Approach

GitHub data lives in Supabase, not in the client. Sync runs on login and via a nightly cron job; manual re-sync is gated by a 30-minute per-user cooldown. The client never touches the GitHub API directly. Every state mutation that affects competitive standing — raid resolution, achievement evaluation, payment fulfillment — runs server-side only, with atomic database writes. The client sends intent; the server decides the outcome. Row Level Security was active from the first migration, scoped to auth.uid() on every table, so even a leaked anon key can't read another player's data. Stripe purchases are fulfilled only after webhook signature verification, never on the client redirect.

The Outcome

Shipped solo over 8 weeks as a working multiplayer platform. The leaderboard has real competing users across language categories; the raid system runs server-authoritatively with cooldowns and newcomer protection; the marketplace ships with Stripe in testing and a Razorpay swap planned for production launch. The architecture holds up because the hard decisions (cache layer, server authority, RLS) were made before any feature work — not retrofitted under load.