Scorbit

Scorbit

2024 – 2025See live
Steve on X

Scorbit connects pinball machines of any age to the cloud, unlocking more fun, engagement and revenue. Players track every score, follow friends and compete for real cash at the bars and arcades they love, and operators get the tools to run their floor.

I led the backend development of their web application and APIs, about 2,100 commits, and rebuilt their marketing site.

Scorbit

A web app for players and venues

I built the logged-in web app from scratch on Django, Vue 3 and Tailwind 4. Players get profiles with followers and insights; venues, machines, manufacturers and collections get pages of their own; and there's search, leaderboards and notifications throughout. Operators manage their machines, venues and competitions in the same app.

Scorbit's tools for arcades and operators
The web app's machines screen, on the operators page

Every ball, charted

Scorbit devices upload a log of every game. I parse those into per-player, per-ball timelines, picking out multiballs and extra balls, and chart them, so a score tells the story of the game rather than just its ending. Players can react to scores, and claim them with a photo.

Leaderboards straight out of Postgres

Leaderboards are SQL views, with 14, 30, 90, 180 and 365-day versions generated automatically. Claimed scores are a materialized view that refreshes only when scores change, so the busiest leaderboards stay fast without a cache to keep in sync.

Tournaments and ScorbitVision

Venues run events and competitions with entry rules and age limits, and show them on ScorbitVision: live leaderboards and machine boards for the screens on the arcade floor.

Scorbit's live leaderboards
Live leaderboards

Find a game near you

I moved venues onto PostGIS, imported them from Pinball Map, synced the machine catalog from OPDB, added check-ins, and moved the map from Google Maps to MapLibre.

Finding a game near you with Scorbit
Find a game, then compete for cash

An API built to last

API v2 became the default, documented with OpenAPI, with Scorbitron pairing codes and sign-in with Google, Apple, Facebook and Discord. Test coverage went to 100%, and CI fails below it.

The marketing site

I rebuilt scorbit.io from scratch: a custom WordPress theme on Tailwind 4 and Blade, replacing an off-the-shelf Divi theme. Its leaderboard, team and tournament blocks pull live data from the Scorbit API, and images are served through Cloudflare.

scorbit.io
scorbit.io

References

Jay Adelson, Co-Founder & CEO at Scorbit

Steve joined us in 2024 to help with our backend development. Steve is extremely bright, high-energy, talented and enthusiastic engineer who is extremely capable at very complex and difficult tasks, even when the tasks are unpleasant. He also brings knowledge of design to the table, which helped him perform more autonomously and grapple UI/UX issues. Perhaps most memorably, his knowledge of CI/CD and orchestration/devops was rock solid, helping the team adopt a more reliable and consistent release process. Best of all, he's a pretty damn good pinball player!

Jay Adelson, Co-Founder & CEO at Scorbit