Top all-time · #2021
Collective Idea
Company blog · collectiveidea.com/blog · on HN as danielmorrisonprogrammingweb
Collective Idea is the company blog at collectiveidea.com, writing about programming and web. Since 2010, 37 different Hacker News readers have linked it 151 times, most often “Where's Your Business Logic?”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-10-28, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Commenters link Collective Idea's blog as a reference for Rails and Ruby topics, including MVC, Capybara feature testing and Rails secrets configuration. Most comments cite posts as support rather than judge them.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Collective Idea builds amazing software that solves real problems. Our small team of professionals works tightly together and closely with ...
Most-linked posts?
- Where's Your Business Logic?4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2012-06-28
- WISP TRIALS: WAITING FOR THE BALLOONS2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-02-01
- The Marriage of Figaro… and Rails 4.1 👰2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-12-18
- Bundler's Multiple Source Security Vulnerability2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-10-06
What Hacker News says?
Wow. As a designer who recently took the plunge into learning MVC (via Ruby/Rails), this is incredibly easy to understand. It took a bit of thinking to understand MVC but for some reason, separating out the concept of operations/events makes it blatantly obvious. Now an important question: how would you practically implement this? Would this dicate a separate framework/language altogether or something else (I have a…
Comment linking /blog/archives/2012/06/28/wheres-your-business-logic/
on “MVC is dead, it's time to MOVE on”Submitted Walken on Rails as a story · 125 points
HN discussionMore info on Secrets.yml VS Figaro here http://collectiveidea.com/blog/archives/2013/12/18/the-marri...
Comment linking /blog/archives/2013/12/18/the-marriage-of-figaro-and-rails/
on “Rails 4.1.0 released”Submitted Happy Git Commits as a story · 122 points
HN discussionhelmehn, I founded Collective Idea ( http://collectiveidea.com ) a successful and growing Ruby shop in West Michigan (Downtown Holland). We are actively looking for programmers, and I know many other companies in the area that are too. The ones I've talked to recently are looking for Ruby, Objective-C, and PHP, but I'm sure there are many, many more. West Michigan is actually a fantastic place to be a programmer rig…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Desperate Python Hacker Seeking Help and Suggestions”Submitted Playing with Go: Embarrassingly Parallel Scripts as a story · 97 points
HN discussionThis can't get here fast enough. To people who don't really get why they're doing this, or who think it only makes sense in undeveloped regions with no cell towers, I wrote about this here: http://collectiveidea.com/blog/archives/2016/01/15/wisp-tria... Basically, if you think that in developed areas cell tower density has or should have an inverse correlation with the cost of bandwidth, then you don't live in the r…
Comment linking /blog/archives/2016/01/15/wisp-trials-waiting-for-the-balloons/
on “Google plans to beam 5G internet from solar drones”Submitted Your identity ≠ Your code as a story · 96 points
HN discussionUpdate (in case anybody sees this) an example of the sort of information I was looking for could be found here: http://collectiveidea.com/blog/archives/2012/06/28/wheres-yo...
Comment linking /blog/archives/2012/06/28/wheres-your-business-logic/
on “The Game of Distributed Systems Programming”Submitted A Simple Pair Programming Setup with SSH and Tmux as a story · 82 points
HN discussionSeconded, I did not try all of the other ways you had to go through, fortunately I was already using Selenium with chromedriver in my testing and I found this great set of examples for testing file downloads: [1] https://collectiveidea.com/blog/archives/2012/01/27/testing-... [2] https://forum.shakacode.com/t/how-to-test-file-downloads-wit... It looks like the second linked post here derives from the first, but both…
Comment linking /blog/archives/2012/01/27/testing-file-downloads-with-capybara-and-chromedriver
on “Running feature specs with Capybara and Chrome headless”Submitted SSL with Rails as a story · 65 points
HN discussionI don't think it does, though. "Innovation" isn't solely a function of the number of failed attempts, despite the fact that this particular way of looking at it has become trendy of late. Take a look at that last link, and specifically at how I unpack the lightbulb analogy that you used above and that's so popular with the "fast failure" set: https://collectiveidea.com/blog/archives/2015/09/24/the-righ... "Yeah, I k…
Comment linking /blog/archives/2015/09/24/the-right-way-to-think-about-whatsapps-massive-engineering-team
on “America has become too anti-innovation”Submitted Reflections on MongoDB as a story · 58 points
HN discussionHate on this guy all you want, but there's a lot right with this article. I covered this same set of issues at Ars way back in the day: https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/07/7340/ https://arstechnica.com/security/2008/03/paying-for-secrets-... What passes for "innovation" nowadays, especially in the world of software startups that HN tends to venerate, is typically nothing of the sort. It's actually just gam…
Comment linking /blog/archives/2015/09/24/the-right-way-to-think-about-whatsapps-massive-engineering-team
on “America has become too anti-innovation”Submitted Automatic Login Links as a story · 57 points
HN discussionI've been using this in beta for some of my personal projects that run on hobby dynos. This doesn't actually give you the certificates, it just allows you to upload the certificates you get elsewhere to heroku and then configures the server for your heroku app from there. I find it very helpful to be able to do this for free... for some of my hobby projects, it's cost prohibitive to spend more than a few dollars a m…
Comment linking /blog/archives/2016/01/12/lets-encrypt-with-a-rails-app-on-heroku/
on “SSL Is Now Included on All Paid Dynos”Submitted The Billy Baldwin of Conditional Assignment in Ruby as a story · 54 points
HN discussionI very recently wrote http://collectiveidea.com/blog/archives/2012/03/16/your-iden... and I think it's very relevant in encouraging people just beginning to contribute to open source.
Comment linking /blog/archives/2012/03/16/your-identity-your-code/
on “Rookies in the Bike Shed”Submitted Using Stripe to accept credit cards as a story · 49 points
HN discussionThank you for pointing this out. Addressed in the comments: http://collectiveidea.com/blog/archives/2011/06/21/the-billy...
Comment linking /blog/archives/2011/06/21/the-billy-baldwin-of-conditional-assignment/
on “The Billy Baldwin of Conditional Assignment in Ruby”Submitted Command Line Feedback from RVM and Git as a story · 41 points
HN discussionWe use an interactor pattern with organizers to keep domain logic dry and reusable. Skinny models and controllers. http://collectiveidea.com/blog/archives/2012/06/28/wheres-yo...
Comment linking /blog/archives/2012/06/28/wheres-your-business-logic/
on “Rails is half of your application”Submitted Where's Your Business Logic? as a story · 34 points
HN discussionIt is the second event of Finish Weekend. http://collectiveidea.com/blog/archives/2011/10/22/starting-... and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3136784
Comment linking /blog/archives/2011/10/22/starting-is-easy-finish-something-at-finish-weekend/
on “Finish Weekend Ann Arbor”Submitted Standalone JavaScript Routing as a story · 32 points
HN discussionSubmitted Finish Weekend Ann Arbor as a story · 30 points
HN discussionSubmitted Language Matters - Thoughts on the Rspec debate as a story · 25 points
HN discussionSubmitted Full Text Searching with Solr and Sunspot as a story · 25 points
HN discussionSubmitted Background Job Processing for Atheists as a story · 23 points
HN discussion
