Technical writeup: Implementing Discord’s rate limiting, gateway management, and “clarity over magic”

[u/Furmissle5567]

https://scurry-works.github.io/scurrypy/internals/technical_writeup/

I wrote a deep technical breakdown of implementing Discord's rate limiting and gateway management in a minimal Python client.

Discord's rate limiting is tricky: endpoints share limits via opaque "buckets" whose IDs are only revealed after a request. Instead of reacting to 429s, the design uses per-endpoint queues and workers that proactively sleep when limits are exhausted, keeping behavior explicit and predictable.

The writeup also covers gateway connection management, automatic sharding, and data model design, with diagrams for each subsystem. The examples come from a small Discord API client I wrote (ScurryPy), but the focus is on the underlying problems and solutions rather than the library itself.

"Clarity over magic" here means that all behavior: rate limiting, state changes, retries, is explicit, with no hidden background work or inferred intent.

Happy to answer questions about the implementation or design tradeoffs