Secret Santa Overkill

José Joaquín Atria (‎JJ‎)

London.pm

Wednesday, 9 August 2017 15:35

20 minutes

Any

English 

Coming from a big family means I had plenty of Secret Santas growing up.

As a child, I was happy to leave the sorting process to my elders. But as I grew older, pulling pieces of paper from a hat quickly became untenable (not only was it analogue, but more importantly... _it wasn't secret_).

The raptor comes to the rescue. About five years ago I took over this family tradition. Year after year, as I learned more about writing Perl, what started as a simple Perl script has become a wonderfully over-engineered and highly-modular solution for all your Secret Santa needs.

Join me as I review the commit history of this mess and uncover, not the origin story of a module, but of a Perl hacker. 

christmas history personal random