Over the course of my experience as a developer, I’ve often found that when things get complex - they get really complex. Often times the key to a solution isn’t finding the one thing that solves a problem, but rather the combination of different functionalities that ends up being the solution that works the best. In the case of one of our pro-bono projects, I had a particularly difficult problem that I needed to solve - and the solution that I arrived at involved a combination of Postgres’ Common Table Expressions, Window Functions, SearchLight, and Rails Query Scopes. What on earth was I trying to accomplish that could possibly elicit this witches brew of open source technologies? Simple: I needed to take user-supplied input, sanitize it, geocode it, then ensure that the result set did not contain duplicates. Each of the tools listed above contributed in some fashion to the working solution!