E-Summit 2026

End-to-end ticketing system that processed 100+ paid passes and 11,000+ registrations with zero downtime.

ReactJavaScriptTailwind CSSNode.jsExpress.jsMongoDBNginxPM2

The Problem

Scale and Fraud Risks at E-Summit

IIT Dharwad's flagship E-Summit 2026 anticipated over 11,000+ registrations and required a ticketing system for premium passes. The organizing team faced severe constraints: under 4 weeks to launch the entire registration-to-entry pipeline, zero payment gateway fees to protect unit economics, and strict limits on UPI accounts. Without an automated gate-checking and tracking system, we risked duplicate tickets, payment verification fraud, and massive entry-gate bottlenecks.

The Solution

ACID Monolith with Round-Robin VPA Distribution

Engineered a secure full-stack monorepo featuring atomic transactional pass generation, automated payment verification, and multi-layered server security deployed on a college-hosted VPS.

Key Technical Decisions

01Led backend architecture and security supporting 11,000+ registrations and 100+ paid passes by configuring Nginx, rate-limiting, Helmet, and RBAC security layers.

02Eliminated double-spend and partial pass-generation failures under heavy concurrent checkout load by implementing ACID-compliant Mongoose transactions.

03Circumvented per-account payment throttles and daily gateway transaction limits by designing a round-robin UPI QR routing system across 3 distinct VPA accounts.

04Prevented UTR (Unique Transaction Reference) validation fraud and duplication by enforcing sparse unique indexes on MongoDB ledger collections.

05Guaranteed 99.8% first-attempt email delivery and zero notification loss for transactional tickets by building a custom MongoDB-backed task queue with 5-tier exponential backoff retry (30s–10m).

06Automated production deployments and minimized update disruptions to zero seconds by building a CI/CD pipeline via GitHub Actions and PM2 process manager.

Impact & Results

11,000+

Registrations

100%

Ticket Fulfillment

99.8%

Email Success

approx 0 min

System Downtime

Seamless Ticketing and Gate Operations

The system successfully handled the entire E-Summit lifecycle without a single data mismatch or double-spend. Transactional email tickets reached attendees' inboxes with 99.8% first-attempt success. Gate check-in queues were resolved in under 2 seconds per attendee, letting organizers run event check-ins with complete data visibility.

Key Learnings

MongoDB transactions require strict session lifecycle cleanup — learned that unclosed sessions block concurrent database connections. Now, I always manage transaction sessions within try/catch/finally blocks.

Round-robin VPA distribution prevents payment gateway throttling — distributing payments across multiple VPAs bypasses UPI daily limits and keeps checkout paths open under peak load.

PM2 zero-downtime reloads are essential for production — deploying updates without terminating active client requests is non-negotiable for ticketing systems.