Periodic messages in Elixir

Today I needed to implement a task that happens once every 24 hours. I immediately thought, well this should be a cron job, but my co-worker suggested using the send_after method in a GenServer instead.

    Process.send_after(self, {:"$gen_cast", :get_data}, interval)

The third argument is a milliseconds argument that determines when the call will be processed. The $gen_cast is a hackish type of thing to get the GenServer to handle the call with handle_cast.

The periodism should start in the init and whenever handle_cast is called, it should schedule a new time that the message will be sent.

  def init(state) do
    work
    Process.send_after(self, {:"$gen_cast", :get_data}, interval)
    {:ok, state}
  end

  def handle_cast(:get_data, state) do
    Process.send_after(self, {:"$gen_cast", :get_data}, interval)
    work
    {:noreply, state}
  end

H/T Micah Cooper