A Hack-Along. In a downtrodden economy, you decide to become a hacker. It's a Tuesday and you quit smoking.  Trading one vice for another and because you are curious, by dinnertime you manage to steal, or purchase on a Russian website a friend recommended, a little taste of goods freed from a more commercial site…

A How To.  This week I learned something new: how to have the WireMock server return a different JSON response depending on what's in the body of the HTTP request.  So if you read this, then you will be smarter than I was a week ago.  (Screencast included!)

Documentation vs. Marketing.  Whether as a backend for mobile apps or for something else, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an exciting platform.  And yet, hard drives (AWS's "EBS volumes"), an AWS topic, have a soporific effect on me, even when they are networked drives and coupled with virtual machines that compute things ("ec2 instances").  Even when they can be attached and detached and reattached at will, persisting storage from one ec2 instance to the next.  Still.  Perhaps it's because I am a software guy … So, to help me flip my thinking, I made a simple calculator.  This calculator takes the documentation and helps me think about it in reverse.