Martin Hicks - Journal

Serverless Advocate #85 asks Lee Harding which AWS service he's most excited about, and he picks DynamoDB vector indexes.

Dynoxide has had DynamoDB vector search since 1.0.0 landed on the 25th of August: vector indexes, SearchVectors, and the write paths keeping them current.

Since the board started it has published one number per emulator: a pass rate over the tests that emulator attempted.

Update, 20th August 2026.

My conformance suite has had a per-index capacity assertion since fairly early on.

Dynoxide 0.12.0 is out.

A conformance suite is only as good as its ground truth.

Dynoxide 0.11.3 is a small one, and for once there isn't a conformance fix in it.

Dynoxide 0.11.2 is a conformance patch - a stack of fixes for spots where the engine did something real DynamoDB doesn't.

Leonie opened an issue on the suite the other week with a question I couldn't answer off the top of my head: when you run a conditional write inside a DynamoDB transaction, does the condition cost you read capacity on top of the write?

Dynoxide 0.11.1 is a small patch.

Dynoxide 0.11.0 packages the browser engine as an npm module and fixes a stack of correctness bugs.

I've been building on DynamoDB since around 2015, and these days I build tools for it: dynoxide, a DynamoDB engine, and Nubo, a native client.

My DynamoDB conformance suite went red this week, and the test that failed was real AWS.

My wife Helen, who works in HR, sent me an episode of HR Disrupted last week - Lucy Adams interviewing Andy Doyle from Kantar on putting AI agents into production HR workflows.

A DynamoDB-compatible database, running in a browser tab.

My instruction-count benchmarks for Dynoxide, my embeddable DynamoDB engine in Rust, only ever ran in CI.

My DynamoDB conformance suite has a site now: paritysuite.org.

Yesterday I logged into GitHub and noticed a Dependabot alert sitting on dynoxide.

Dynoxide now lives entirely in its own public repo, out of the private workspace it shared with Nubo.

It's been a year since I built my Intel N100 home server, and a few things have happened since I wrote that post.

Update, July 2026.

Dynoxide 0.9.8 fixes a bug where backgrounding dynoxide in an npm script left it running after the parent process exited.

I've been working with DynamoDB for the best part of a decade.

My son Ben is 12.

Around 2010, my personal website had a Last.fm widget showing what I'd been listening to.

After setting up AdGuard Home and Unbound on my home server, DNS filtering was working perfectly for every device on the home network.

After building my Intel N100 home server, the next step was improving the network itself.

Over the past few years my home setup has gradually grown more complicated.

Intro This article will walk through the steps required to create a Cloudfront function to handle redirecting trailing slash URIs to non-trailing slash equivalents on your S3 hosted 11ty website.

I've just published a minor update to my CSRF plugin for Enhance projects. v0.9.0 now supports multipart/form data, meaning you can easily use the <csrf-form></csrf-form> component for forms that contain file uploads. usage: <csrf-form method="post" actio…

Introduction When working on a recent web app project using Enhance, I encountered a requirement for using both transactions and DynamoDB streams, two DynamoDB features that aren't supported by Dynalite - the fast in-memory DynamoDB engine that Architect…

tldr: If you visited my site between 2022-12-01 and 2022-12-18 you might not be seeing updated content on previously accessed pages.

I recently rebuilt this website and my company website - sinovi.uk - using Eleventy 2.0 and their new WebC language for templating.

This post introduces a new arc plugin for Enhance projects that I've recently published, with the catchy name shared-enhance-components-plugin.

As 2022 draws to a close I wanted to reflect on a welcome change in the web framework world that shifts the needle back towards web-first principles.