It was pretty difficult to meet up with people in the run up to Christmas in 2020 thanks, covid. I wrote this app to make it a little easier for groups of people to exchange gifts remotely. I’ve really enjoyed playing white elephant in person, so this seemed like a good idea.

Design

This is a React app hosted in S3 behind Cloudflare. I’ve used this approach for a few sites at this point, so it was something I could get running quickly.

This uses peer-to-peer communication using WebRTC. I entertained the idea of publicizing this app more broadly. If it gained traction, I didn’t want to have to deal with any server costs. This design allowed me to play with peer-to-peer systems and offload all of the computation onto clients.

Highlights

• This is probably the first of my side projects that people I didn’t directly know beforehand used in production. Both my work and my wife’s work used this for a holiday gift exchange.

• It’s free to host, and should scale fairly well

• I’ve used this for other things, like deciding which player/civilization people should play as in games (eg Age of Empires). It can be more fun than randomizing game starts.

Downsides

• Peer-to-peer meant that it was hard to persist data. The host of the game has to be online at all times.

• Peer-to-peer is also somewhat confusing in the code, as every client could be either a host or a participant.