This may seem obvious to most, especially to regular blog readers but don’t forget the development community when working on projects. There is a large community of developers and many are willing to share ideas, code, and techniques.

When I am stumped, or simply taxed with a problem that has a common element to it, I have a pretty standard sequence of steps I take to see if I can get help or find a component that someone else created already. Most projects break down into 2 items, common problems and issues specific to your company, environment, etc…

Recently while talking with our operations manager he mentioned he was having problems with an old isapi filter we use to receive and parse incoming customer service tickets. The filter was written over 6 years ago, and the source code is gone. We are lacking a good deploy plan for this filter and we needed to replace it soon. We came up with a very simple solution. Have our mail server dump the incoming .msg files to a secure directory, and write a simple parser to monitor, parse, and insert the tickets into our system.

So I set to work. We are primarily a ColdFusion shop here, however we do write in many other languages. This was a task that would be easily written in ColdFusion and would also run extremely fast. It seemed like the right tool for the job. ColdFusion also has an event monitor that will monitor a directory for new or changed files and trigger code. I have had mixed results with it in the past, but this seemed like a good place to try again. If not, I could simply schedule the script to run at set intervals.

First step, open a msg file and see what we got. Wow, that was going to be a mess to parse. But I had a hunch someone wrote a basic email parser in ColdFusion. If I found one, that would let me spend the time coding the specific pieces of this project related to our environment. So I immediately turned to the community.

Here is a general run down of the steps I take when looking for some code or tips.
- I send an email to my development team. If they already wrote or found similar code, then problem solved.

- Next, I Google my issue. In this case “coldfusion email parser”

- Check a few of the code community sites I have bookmarked in Delicious. In Delicious I keep code and community sites tagged with the language they serve. In this case, fusion authority, adobe, ray camdem’s blog, etc… Whenever I come across a code repository, or good language specific blog, I tag it in delicious. You never know when you’ll need it.

- Twitter: I don’t send a tweet often to ask for help rather, I run a search similar to Google in TweetDeck. I may create one or two searches and let them run. This usually leads me to people who are having similar issues, or possibly written about something I need.

- Finally, if I have time to wait for a response, I go back to some of the code specifics resources I mentioned earlier, and post a question.

One of these usually leads me to the path I need. I have had great success with these methods. Sometimes the module I find is slightly out of date or missing a few key elements I have to add. This is fine, it at least give you a starting point. For example I found a BaseCamp component that worked with their old API. I found it quite easy to add the new API methods and bring it up to date. It provided a nice clean framework to work with. I recommend if you do make changes that the community might find beneficial, please give it back to the community. As soon as I clean up the BaseCamp component, I plan to submit it back to the repository I found it.

This same process can be applied to whole open source apps, you are not limited to simple components when looking for a building block for your project. That’s what makes the development community on the web so useful.

Do you have other techniques, or processes to find help and code you need? Let us know in the comments.

Update 5/7/2009 by Bill: I did eventually find a ColdFusion component that parses emails via my google search. It was on Tom Mollerus’ WebLog. It worked great, and saved me a lot of time. I was able to get this running in a few hours, instead of days.

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code, experiences by bill breen