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I think I’m missing some implicit constraints here. Firstly, I guess they’re assuming that the person organizing the event also wants to participate, or at leas

I think I’m missing some implicit constraints here. Firstly, I guess they’re assuming that the person organizing the event also wants to participate, or at least doesn’t want to know the pairings. But even then, couldn’t you just shuffle the names once and pair everyone with the next name in the list (wrapping around from that last to the first)? Is that not supposed to be “random” enough? You could also just write a simple program to shuffle the names until you get valid pairings and print or otherwise send the pairings without looking at them. What am I missing?

Falkon1313 5y ago
You are absolutely correct. It's a very simple and commonly-done thing that doesn't need any complexity at all. As developers and techy people we can go to extraordinary lengths to overcomplicate things. I was half-expecting the post to end by discussing that, shortly after a bit about using a hypervisor control system to manage the cluster of cloud-hosted microservices that orchestrate all of the AbstractSecretSantaServiceFactoryInterface instances. Then like, "Haha, gotchya! All you really have to do is this."