Taqneeq fest backend

Taqneeq is NMIMS’s flagship tech fest — three days, thousands of attendees, and a fest-wide game where people earn and spend credits. I was the lead author of the backend that runs that game: sign-ins, points, a referral loop, and a leaderboard that stays live without melting the database.

What it does

• Phone-OTP login — attendees authenticate with a one-time code, no passwords in the mix.
• Role-based credits — SALES and ADMIN roles allocate points to attendees; attendees redeem them, all against a per-user transaction ledger (who did what, when).
• Referrals — auto-generated referral codes with referred_by tracking, and the abuse handling that shows up the instant there’s an incentive.
• A live leaderboard and a server-rendered admin portal at a configurable secret path.

The scaling detail

At a fest, everyone opens the leaderboard at once. Reading Firestore on every request would be both slow and expensive, so the leaderboard is cached with a short TTL — the crowd hits the cache, and the database only gets touched a couple of times a minute regardless of how many people are watching.

Why Firestore + Flask

For an event that exists for three days, operational simplicity beats theoretical scale. Flask blueprints per domain (auth, credits, admin) kept it readable, Firestore removed schema-migration risk during a fast build, and a Vercel deploy meant no servers to babysit during the fest itself.

The whole system had a three-day window to be perfect in. The credits, the leaderboard, and the ledger all held — you can see the fest it ran at, live, above.