🎅 Secret Santa Draw

API | Client | iOS

This year's offering expands upon last year's PWA, transforming it into a full-fledged platform complete with an accompanying iOS/Android application (coming soon). It brings holiday cheer by making Secret Santa draws a breeze to organise, whether gathered around the tree or connected online! 🎄

The service was built in a RAD manner, with a self-imposed time constraint of just a couple of evenings for development - driven by the goal of getting something shipped! 🚀

Features

• Local In-Person Draws: Conduct offline Secret Santa draws, retaining the functionality of the original PWA.
• Online Remote Draws:
  • Register and create groups to manage annual Secret Santa draws.
  • Add participants with names and email addresses.
  • Apply allocation exclusions (e.g., couples, previous pairings).
• Automated Email Notifications: Participants receive an email with their Secret Santa allocation.
• Gift Ideas Management: Participants can provide and view gift ideas for their assigned allocation.
• Account Registration:
  • Participants can optionally register with the service.
  • Allocations are linked to accounts based on email address, consolidating access to all associated draws.

Future Features

• Prefill Draw Entries: Automatically populate draw participants from the previous year's draw.
• Enhanced Gift Ideas: Support for various idea types (URLs, images, etc.).

🛠️ Technical Overview

This project builds on last year's PWA by incorporating a backend API, enabling remote draw capabilities and account-based access.

Backend API

• RESTful HAL-based API, embracing HATEOAS principles.
• Laravel 11, with Sanctum for cookie-based sessions
• PostgreSQL
• PHP 8.4
• Lambda Bref for Serverless deployment
• Email notifications sent using the Laravel Jobs queue

Client Application

• React, with React Router
• TypeScript
• Vite
• PWA features, such as offline support
• Uses the Ketting HTTP library to manage access to the HAL-based API

iOS Application

• Thin application which wraps PWA
• Swift
• Universal Link support
• Based on the great ios-pwa-wrap project!

Infrastructure

• AWS CDK for IaC concerns
• Lambda Bref for Serverless API deployment
• SQS for background/asynchronous Laravel jobs
• S3 bucket for static Client deployment
• Fronted by a CloudFront distribution that manages caching concerns

Other Years

Interested in seeing how I over-engineered the problem of allocating Secret Santa's in other years?

• 2020 - Clojure Secret Santa
• 2021 - Pico Secret Santa
• 2022 - Step Function Secret Santa
• 2023 - Secret Santa PWA
• 2024 - Secret Santa Draw