Managing affordable housing properties involves far more than keeping a list of buildings and units. Every property comes with recurring reports, inspections, renewals, financial obligations, important contacts, and years of supporting documents.

When that information is spread across calendars, shared drives, inboxes, and individual staff members, even routine work can become difficult to track. A missed deadline or an unavailable document can create delays for the entire team.

This is one of the problems I built PMDB to solve.

In some cases it is necessary to update a deeply nested attribute in a map. I went searching for a way to do this and came across several approaches, the one that worked for me was this, a combination of Kernel.put_in and Access.key, here I’m using it to update a socket struct nested assigns map.

put_in(socket, Enum.map([:assigns, :beacon_live_data, :form_submitted], &Access.key(&1, %{})), true)

The put_in function is pretty easy to understand, it Puts a value in a nested structure via the given path. The tricky bit is the path.

In one of the projects that I work on, for the sake of availability and reliability, we are running our Phoenix app in a cluster of 3 servers using libcluster. Initially, it was just running on a single server and I had configured Quantum to run our recurring tasks on a cron like schedule. This worked well, and I had no issues with the setup. When we decided to move to a clustered setup, there was a consideration concerning Quantum. I didn’t want the jobs to run on multiple servers, I wanted to have a single server responsible for handling all the scheduled jobs so as to keep duplicate jobs from running. I looked around and found someone who had written about using Highlander to make sure there was only a single instance of Quantum running on the cluster at a time. I decided to try this out.