Posts by Daniel Morrison

I don’t like deleting old migrations in my Rails apps, but if I did, here’s how I’d do it,

Some fun with Postgres to find users for whom it is a certain time.

Have a really old Heroku app that recently broke? We help with a handful. Here’s what we do to fix them.

A rethinking of a 2015 post to keep certificates current. Now using cron and Dead Man’s Snitch.

You’ve heard of IoT, but do you know what it is really? We’ll share a few ways it is being used in the home, business, and the classrooms.

Our team does a lot of very cool work, but we’re often barred from talking about it. So recently we decided to focus on some projects we can talk about and wrote up some case studies. Here are three.

We’re happy to add another designer to the Collective Idea team!

It’s true… we hired another Hope College graduate.

We’ve added a marketing person to our team!

We’re very excited to belatedly welcome Troy Spruit to the Collective Idea family.

While looking at a controller today, I came to the conclusion it’s better to use ActionController:API instead of ActionController::Metal. Here’s why.

During the third and final Presidential Debate, the hashtag #TrumpBookReport was trending on Twitter. Turns out, I created this hashtag sensation, and I can teach you my tricks.

Starting today, Heroku has a new free SSL offering. Use it with Let’s Encrypt for a fully free SSL system.

I’ve been using and teaching Ruby for many years now, but I recently had an epiphany about private methods.

This past year we expanded our office space and our team. We held a Grand Opening party to celebrate.

Out of all the places in the world we can set up shop to do software development, we’re in Holland, Michigan and thriving.

Our space is a bit different than many offices, but is a reflection of how we work.

GitHub is changing their prices for organizations. Here’s why you should stop worrying.

We’re in the middle of expanding our office in located in Downtown Holland. Before we unveil the office it its entirety, check out our previous [i] space in 3D!

I needed to renew an SSL certificate today, so I used it as an excuse to try Let’s Encrypt for a free certificate for a Rails app hosted on Heroku.

PostgreSQL 9.5 was released yesterday and has a lot of cool new features. If you’re on Mac OS X and using Homebrew, you can upgrade with the steps below.

We’re launching a fleet of bicycles from our office!

How can our test suite tell us when a certificate expires? We’ll show you.

We’re excited to welcome Dana Jones to the Collective Idea team!

We need to make getting up and running with our Rails apps easier. Here’s my attempt.

Some tricks to help you fix tests that sometimes fail.

We’re very excited to welcome Ray Brown to the Collective Idea family.

We’re very excited to welcome Laura Mosher to our team!

Collective Idea turns 10 today!

Healthcare.gov leaks patient data to 3rd parties. Does your Healthcare startup do the same?

How do you test a slow file upload? Force it to be slow.

I want to make Ruby better by making it smaller. Who wants to help?

Tips on how we like to organize Gemfiles and keep it clean.

People are under the impression that HABTM relationships are deprecated because of the newer Has Many Through relationship. Both are good, and both have their place, but HABTM is still valid, vibrant, and useful!

We had an issue this morning with Dead Man’s Snitch which led to some surprising issues with ANAME DNS records.

We’re very excited to welcome Chris Rittersdorf to Collective Idea!

A couple years ago we built a really simple web app to track data loss now it tracks when you’re sick too. Here’s our silly app of the day.

We’re happy to announce that Tres Trantham has joined the Collective Idea family.

Today we’re thrilled to announce the addition of Spencer Toth to the Collective Idea team. Spencer is joining us to take our marketing and strategy to new levels.

We’re excited to welcome Victor Sirotek to our team!

Today we’re very excited to announce that we’ve made a new product acquisition: Dead Man’s Snitch.

After teaching an Advanced Rails class last week, I realized that we use a lot of patterns internally to build great APIs in Rails that many people don’t know about. We didn’t invent most of them, but we use them with great success, so we need to start sharing.

Now is the time to disconnect. Not forever, not always, but we need to disconnect so we can reconnect with the world.

I’m extremely excited to introduce Downside, our first foray into building a game for iOS.

We’re gearing up for Conference Season. Want to see us in the flesh? Avoid us? Here’s the start of our schedule so you can plan accordingly.

After doing a bit of boring research, we bought a printer. Here’s hoping this helps someone in the same boat!

A little peek behind the scenes about how we built out our new office.

We’ve officially move to our new office, and have lots to share on the process.

One of our clients was recently burned by their hosting company not providing the backups they expected. As we helped transition them to a new system, I focused on setting up solid backups and am very pleased with the results: Fully automated, offsite backups for under $2/month.

It doesn’t matter how good your test suite is, you have to run through on your server to know it works.

We had way too much fun with Ruby and Unicode, and the result is that you can now join in the fun with our unicode_math gem.

I noticed a strange JavaScript loading fallback today. Often simplicity can trump having fallbacks.

Today we welcome Jonathan Pichot to the team, and we’re very excited to do so!

Harmony has been fighting a DDoS attack for over a month, and we’re sharing a bit of how we fixed it.

Welcome Eric Milford to the team.

LinkedIn screwed up, but you can be smarter. When you store a password, you’re holding a key to untold secrets. The goal is to keep that key safe from everyone, even you.

Today I removed all of my rules in Mail.app. It is easier than you think, you just have to get less email.

Welcome Brian Hempel (officially) to the team.

Jason Roelofs joins the Collective Idea team today and we couldn’t be happier.

We’re very excited to announce that Collective Idea has acquired Harmony from GitHub. Harmony is an amazing app for building websites, and we’re very excited to help guide it to continued greatness.

Welcome David to the Collective Idea team!

Our new screencast series features narration by Christopher Walken.

We’re bringing Finish Weekend to Ann Arbor!

Most of the time, you test your apps on a fast connection, especially when working on a local machine. Most of your clients/visitors/customers aren’t so lucky, but how do you simulate their connection speed?

If you have installed Xcode on Lion, you have access to a very cool tool called Network Link Conditioner.

One of the things holding us back from developing on Ruby 1.9.3 has been ruby-debug. So after many people suggested we try it, we gave pry a shot. I don’t know why we didn’t before; it is quick, easy, and allows a wide range of Ruby versions.

We’re thrilled to welcome Ryan Glover to the team.

Dear Everyone, update your keyboard settings so I don’t see you taking forever to delete a few characters.

I like lots of things, but only have a few favorites.

Symbols in Ruby are confusing to new users.

Swapping out Firefox for Chrome is easier than you think!

On the proper use of [i].

Welcome Tim to the Collective Idea team.

Meet Jason, a smart mechanical engineer turned programmer.

We have been using stand-up desks almost exclusively for over a year. Some thoughts and tips.

Do you know the difference between defer and async in your script tags? You will very soon.

A bunch of our team will be at SXSW as usual. Find us and say hi!

Refactoring is an important part of any project, but what happens when it doesn’t work?

Zach Moazeni joins the Collective Idea team.

HOW TO: Setup a new local & remote Git Branch

A whole world of rich objects is within your reach with MongoDB.

Welcome Steve to the Collective Idea team.

My list of open source tools that made a big impact on our work this year.

Lots of people have been wondering about SSL after seeing Firesheep in action. Here’s how to get started with Rails.

Now, I don’t know anything about ZenDesk, but I know a JS snippet when I see it. And I also know I can make it better. Here’s my quick win of the day:

We all have different issues that keep us from trusting todo apps. What about you?

Meet Chris, the newest member of our team.

EarthAid.net stole my idea! So why am I happy instead of mad? Because ideas are worthless.

Relevance posted some notes on remote pair programming so here are ours too.

Are sports black & white, or is there room for human fallibility?

We added a Google Sitemap to our Harmony-powered site. Here’s how to do it.

Our backgrounds change, but they’re not random. We’re more clever than that. Let me explain…

Our workspace helps us work, and for the first time we have one of our own.