How I Built a Real-Time Multiplayer Typing Game with React, TypeScript, Socket.IO & MongoDB

There's a specific kind of developer procrastination where you end up spending hours on a website that has nothing to do with what you were supposed to be working on. For me, that website was TypeRacer. I'd gone down a rabbit hole — racing strangers, watching my WPM climb, refreshing leaderboards at midnight — and somewhere between race 12 and race 13, the thought hit me: I wonder how this actually works under the hood. That curiosity turned into TypeRacrer — a full-stack competitive typing platform I built from scratch. And honestly, it ended up being one of the most technically interesting projects I've ever worked on. Not because it's the most complex thing I've built, but because it forced me to think about problems I'd never had to think about before. This isn't a code tutorial. It's the story behind the project — the decisions, the surprises, and the concepts that finally clicked while building it. Why This Project Is Different From Most Portfolio Projects Most portfolio projects