Secret Santa Assigner

Description

This is a tool I wrote to help plan our Secret Santa assignments each year for Christmas. There are a couple of requirements:

• You should not be paired with your significant other
• You should not be paired with the same person you had last year
• You should not be paired with the same person who is paired with you this year

Design

I considered using a more elaborate solution with select boxes for the significant other and last year participant columns, but those are not supported in vanilla HTML tables. I briefly considered using a more full-featured data table tool like Ag Grid or DevExtreme, but that seemed like overkill for such a simple project.

For the matching algorithm there are certainly more refined solutions involving graph theory. But for this iteration, I used a naïve brute force solution. The algorithm will iterate over each person assigning them a random selection from the eligible participants and if it encounters and error where a match is impossible then it will restart.

This tool stores selections in the browser’s local storage with a year-specific key.

Tool