Santa Hacks

A website to help facilitate a Secret Santa gift exchange

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santaHacks

What it does

Helps communities facilitate secret santa gift exchanges with questions that reflect the interests of the club, bringing communities closer together. For example a CS community may ask questions about favorite programming language, favorite OS, and if they prefer tabs vs spaces.

3 Steps

  • Create an organization Secret Santa pool
    • Organization submits:
      • Org name
      • Questions to ask their members
      • Message for members to see when signing up
      • Deadline for signing up
  • Collect infomation from organization members
    • Web portal for users to apply for the Secret Santa
    • Members submit:
      • Member Name
      • Mailing address
      • Contact information
      • Answers to questions
  • Match up people
    • Connect people
    • Optimize mailing costs

How we did it

  • Website
  • Database
    • Custom built

Inspiration

  • Tis the season that people are planning for Secret Santa, we wanted to make it easier for communities to get closer with personalized questions

Challenges

  • Binary Snow
  • Back end wouldn't link to AWS
  • Aligning the questions and text inputs and figuring out how to use classes for UI
  • UI in general was a pain
  • Creating a web based project with zero web devs
  • Relational vs nonrelational databases
  • MERGE CONFLICTS

Accomplishments

  • Binary snow works
  • Art is pretty
  • Jordan fixed the back end code
  • Platform compatible
  • Created our own database
  • Connecting aws together for one cohesive experience
  • Developing a completely static website to be hosted in an aws s3 bucket

What's Next

  • Effective algorithm to match people according to interests, age, and amount they want to spend
  • Possibly sell preferences to advertisers
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