Shawn Bierman

Chess Leaderboards

Live rankings for 11 kinds of chess

The top 50 players on every Chess.com leaderboard, kept current on its own, with each player’s ratings and recent games a tap away.

My role
Independent project, designer and developer
Years
2023–2026
Site
chessleaderboards.com
Built with
Vue and Go (2026), SvelteKit, Node and MySQL (2023)
The Blitz leaderboard: the top three players on podium cards, then ranks 4 to 10, each with a win record and rating.

The goal

A side project to create my own visualization of Chess.com’s leaderboard data, one that’s fun and interactive. I first built it in 2023 with SvelteKit, Node and MySQL, then rebuilt it from scratch in 2026 with Vue and Go.

What I built

A website that shows the top 50 players on every Chess.com leaderboard, from one-minute bullet to daily games that run for weeks. A Go backend polls Chess.com’s API for updates, and a Vue frontend checks it every minute. Rows animate when ranks change, and there’s search, live stream badges, recent games and player profiles.

Player profiles and search, in light and dark mode

Hikaru Nakamura’s profile panel: his Blitz rating and record, his ratings in other kinds of chess, and his recent games.
A search for “nihal” in dark mode, showing Nihal Sarin’s rank on four leaderboards.

My part

What I did

  • Designed the leaderboards, player profiles and search.
  • Built the Go backend that polls Chess.com’s API.
  • Built the Vue frontend.
  • Built the first version in 2023, and rebuilt it from scratch in 2026.

What others did

  • Chess.com provides the leaderboard data through its public API.
  • Claude Code helped me build the 2026 version, as it did this website.

Results

The 2026 rebuild went live in October 2026.