Every December, Secret Santa shows up again.
And every year, someone ends up managing it with spreadsheets, emails, and a lot of trust.
From a backend perspective, that’s interesting.
Secret Santa is a small problem, but it contains just enough real-world complexity to expose how you design APIs, handle state, deal with randomness, and trigger side effects like emails. That makes it a surprisingly good exercise for Java developers.
Recently, I built a Secret Santa REST API using Quarkus, not as a toy demo, but as a compact, realistic backend service.
This article explains why this problem is interesting and how Quarkus fits naturally. The full hands-on tutorial lives elsewhere.
Why Secret Santa Is a Good Backend Problem
At first glance, it sounds trivial. Pick names at random.
But a real implementation needs to deal with:
- Group ownership and permissions
- Participant management
- Fair randomization rules (no one gets themselves)
- Persistent state
- Side effects like email notifications
- Repeatability and failure handling
That’s already most of what you deal with in real business APIs, just without the enterprise baggage.
Why I Used Quarkus (and Not Spring)
This wasn’t about framework comparisons.
It was about friction.
Quarkus works well here because:
- Dev Services remove setup friction entirely. PostgreSQL just appears.
- Panache keeps the domain model readable.
- Security is explicit and boring, which is good.
- Mailer integration feels like infrastructure, not framework magic.
The result is a service that feels small and intentional, not over-architected.
The Only Hard Part: Fair Pairing
The core of Secret Santa is pairing people so that nobody gets themselves.
This is a classic derangement problem.
The simplest reliable approach for small groups is:
- Copy the participant list
- Shuffle it
- Check for self-assignments
- Retry if needed
It’s not fancy, but it’s correct, readable, and easy to reason about. For typical group sizes, it’s more than enough.
Once the pairing exists, the system shifts from computation to orchestration:
- Persist the result
- Trigger emails
- Avoid regenerating by accident
That transition from pure logic to side effects is where many small demos fall apart. It’s also where Quarkus stays pleasantly boring.
Where the Full Article Goes Deeper
The complete tutorial walks through:
- Project setup with Quarkus 3 and Java 21
- Database-backed authentication
- REST endpoints for groups, members, and wishlists
- Pair generation with persistence
- Email notifications using Quarkus Mailer
- Local development with zero manual infrastructure
Not every backend example needs to be a webshop or a todo app.
Sometimes a seasonal problem with real constraints is the better teacher.
And sometimes, writing boring Java code is exactly how you ship something fun.
Want the Full Hands-On Version?
If you’re interested in the full, end-to-end implementation, including security, persistence, email delivery, and copy-paste-ready code, the complete hands-on walkthrough is here:
👉 https://www.the-main-thread.com/p/secret-santa-api-quarkus-java-tutorial
Top comments (0)