Building Full-Stack Applications with Windsurf

In our last lesson, we performed a major, professional-level refactor of our Snake game. We took a monolithic script and, with Cascade as our co-pilot, transformed it into a well-structured, modular application. Our code is now clean, maintainable, and ready to be expanded. In this lesson, we’re going to do just that. We’re moving beyond improving existing code and into the exciting world of building something entirely new. This lesson will guide you through a complete, end-to-end full stack development workflow. We will build a standalone leaderboard web application and then integrate our Snake game with it, allowing players to submit their scores and compete for the top spot. This process mirrors a core pattern in modern software development: creating specialized microservices that communicate via APIs. We’ll see how Windsurf excels not only at building individual components but also at orchestrating the development of an entire networked application ecosystem.

The project plan: A two-part build

Our mission is divided into two distinct parts, and we will create a new, separate project for the first part.

1. The leaderboard service: We’ll start by building a standalone web application. This will have a simple Node.js and Express backend to store and serve scores, and a React frontend to display the leaderboard in a browser.

2. The game integration: Once our leaderboard is live, we’ll return to our Snake game project. We will modify the game’s “Game Over” screen to include a field for the player’s name and a button to submit their score to our new leaderboard service via an API call.

Let’s begin.

Building the leaderboard backend

First, we need an API. This will be the backbone of our leaderboard, responsible for storing and retrieving ...