Read The Code

6 September 2011 by Jess Brown

Several monts ago, John Nunemaker bloged "Stop Googling". It was about reading the code in an open source project oppsed to Googleing it. He was a bit funstrated at someone who Googled, polled friends, and basically searched everywhere besides the source to look for an answer for their problem.

Today I found out the hard way how right he was. I was trying to access the object info passed along to a delayed_job record. I googled for 30 or 45 minutes trying to find an answer and couldn't get any bites. I knew the handler field had the info I needed, but it was a string. I also knew that somehow that info had to be extracted when my job was processed. Finally on a whim, I looked to the source code. In the second file I opened, I found a method called payload_object.

def payload_object
  @payload_object ||= deserialize(self['handler'])
end

I saw object, deserialize, and handler. That's all I needed to know. It was exactly what I wanted. It took less than a minute. I tried it out and that was it.

That's when I remembered John's blog. Note to self: if a quick google search doesn't display the obvious answer...LOOK AT THE CODE!