I used to believe that I didn’t need to keep up with technical RSS feeds or newsgroups. I learn things quickly and know how to use Google. Thus, if I ever wanted to find some tool to accomplish a certain task or if I hit a problem with a library I was using, I could quickly go out and find what I was looking for. Spending time reading the Hibernate user group and the JBoss user groups and the Spring user group and all the rest just took away time from designing and implementing the next feature on the schedule. Who could possibly remember all the other new product, library, and feature announcements unless you had a need for them right then?

I now know that this is an excellent way to regularly reinvent the wheel. Why? Because you don’t know what you don’t know. Sometimes it’s easy to guess when there are tools, libraries, or entire languages that can help you do your job. For example, we all know that there are many ORM, logging, and xml-parsing libraries.  There are many situations, however, where it is unlikely that you will realize you are facing a problem that someone else has already solved.

This happened to me last spring.  We were in crunch time trying to finish up a release and I had fallen behind on my feed/newsgroup reading.  I winced every time I opened up Google Reader and saw the unread count tick higher and higher.  As part of this release, I wrote a handy little utility routine that let me override a single method of a class by using groovy’s ExpandoMetaClass.  The nice thing about the routine was that it always discarded the modified MetaClass after the closure that was passed to it finished.  I could thus remove the many try…finally blocks that were piling up in my tests as a tried to make sure I didn’t corrupt a MetaClass from one test to another.

A couple of days later, I was able to whittle down the backlog in Google Reader.  That’s when I saw this entry from mrhaki: http://mrhaki.blogspot.com/2010/03/grails-goodness-using-metaclass-with.html.  Built into the GrailsUnitTestCase class was a method that did exactly what I wanted, plus a lot more – registerMetaClass.  Given, my utility routine can be used outside of a Grails’ unit test, so it’s not a complete waste.  But I could have saved myself a few hours of effort if I had been up to date on my reading.  Perhaps I could have spent those hours catching up on the rest of my “To Read” list…