aka Wichteln-as-a-Service
Wichteln (german (verb) for Secret Santa) is fun and will take place these days around the world. But it's not possible everytime to gather around and draw pieces of paper out of a hat. Therefore I created wichteln-as-a-service for all remote developer groups out there.
I like Secret Santa or as we say in Germany to wichtel ;). Like years before I am part of one or more groups. Like this year (2016) we do it for christmas. The problem was, we are all scattered around Germany. So we needed a third instance to trust on so there is no person who knows the outcome.
Gladly, there exits a website called Wichtel-O-Mat. This services allows you to enter eMail addresses and the service will send out mails with all needed information about the person you may get a present for.
This service inspired me. At this time I was looking for a project, which is not too big and easy to develop so I can realize it with Laravel. The goal was not to create something completely new, but to have a side project to work on where I can learn Laravel and how to deploy and run a service properly.
However, Wichtel-O-Mat is nice and I don't want to copy it completely. I thought about it and found out, that this service has no API and I poor developers cannot use it :O
To keep the project even simpler I decided to focus on developers only (in the beginning). That said, wichteln-as-a-service is born. The app runs on Laravel and offers a REST API.
Now even remote developers can play Secret Santa \o/
[17.12.2016] The service is only and running at wichtel.me. However it is still an early beta phase. So please be aware that the endpoints can change and your data may be deleted without warning during this phase.
If you want to join the beta test. Go ahead and start exploring the endpoint and please read the Beta Testers Information.