SECRET SANTA RANDOM EMAIL GENERATOR GENERATOR

This is a very easy step thanks to their crystal-clear tutorials. We are going to use Twilio SendGrid for this, which provides a cloud-based service that assists businesses with email delivery.

Process the result: A succesful draw will trigger contacting the Secret Santas, while a failed one will raise an error and ask the user to review the input parameters.

If it never happens, the loop will break once reaching the max attemps.

If we assign a recipient to all Secret Santas, the draw is successful and the while loop will break.

If not, the draw fails and we start a new one (the while loop restart, we are back at step 2) If we find one, we assign it and we jump to the next SecretSanta.

Go through our list of SecretSanta instances and look for a recipient, which is not on the black-list.

Shuffle our list of names and delete any previous assignment.

Initiate the while loop with our two conditions (success or reaching max attempts).

Here are the main steps I am following, check the GitHub project for the (well-commented!) code: We will therefore wrap everything inside a while loop, that will break if the draw is successful (everyone has been assigned as Secret Santa) or after a maximum numner of attempts (defined in our settings file). But let's keep it simple and take the easy road of trying, until we succeed or decide it's not gonna happen! I'm sure we could come up with a clever algorithm that would analyse all black-lists first and determine if a draw is possible or not. Since we introduced the black-list option, we face the issue that a draw might not be possible due to too many constraints (for instance, some poor guy who would be on everyone's black list!). So why not organise our script a bit by adding a SecretSanta class? Here are the class members and methods we need for the draw:Įnter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode I learned programming using C++ and I have the CLASS word inprinted in caps inside my brain.

Phoebe likes everyone so her black list is empty.

Joey is broke, he bought a cheap present but it's for a guy so he cannot be one of the girl's Secret Santa.

Monica and Chandler should not get each other, as they are married and they wanna give each others more expensive presents.Ross and Rachel should not get each other, cause they had a big fight and they are 'on a break'.a list of names that one Santa should not get for any reason.

I like to spice things up and I thought it would be handy to add a black list feature, i.e. Here is our CSV file, with our six friends and the information we need to contact them. It's a user-friendly way to input data, easier than writing in the script directly. I leaned the Pandas library this year, which is great for extracting information from a CSV file. So this year, let's be clever and use a python script to do the draw and contact Santas per email.

SECRET SANTA RANDOM EMAIL GENERATOR GENERATOR

In the past years, I used a basic random name generator for that, but with the downside that I knew all the assignments and who my Secret Santa was. This way everyone will get a nice present instead of dozens of cheap ones. Every member of the group is assigned one recipient, and as his/her Secret Santa (since these random assignments are kept secret), you need to buy a gift for this person only. If you are not familiar with the concept, it's a nice way to celebrate xmas amongst a large group of friends or family members, withoug having to spend a salary on gifs. So when my mom asked me to draw our Secret Santas this year, I had it. That say, I would like to finish the year on a fun simple project. It's that time of the year, AGAIN! It's been a fast one, but I do feel like I learned a lot, on my holy quest to become a rock-star programmer.

Secret santa random email generator