Reflections on a Failed Student Housing App Project

Steve Frank discusses the journey of developing an Elixir-based student housing application, aimed at smaller colleges that could not afford the high prices of the leading market solutions. He built a Proof of Concept using Elixir with Phoenix + LiveView, TailwindCSS, and Postgres, learning to utilize Ash throughout the development process. Despite not continuing with the project, he shares the value Ash brought in terms of development speed and data structure management. He also speaks about the challenges and solutions of handling user-defined schemas and forms using JSON Schema, which was particularly complex due to the unique needs of individual schools. The article chronicles his selection of additional tools such as Flowbite, AG Grid, JSON Editor, ExJsonSchema, and SortableJS to facilitate various functionalities. Frank concludes by offering the codebase on GitHub for others to benefit from and expresses willingness to discuss more on the topic if there's interest.