Journal
Notes from real projects - AWS, DynamoDB, Rust, home servers, and whatever open source tool I'm currently building.
Dynoxide 0.12.0: PartiQL RETURNING, wasm conformance
RETURNING finally does something, the wasm build lands on the conformance board at 100% over three quarters of the suite, and PartiQL UPDATE stops creating rows it shouldn't.
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You can't pin DynamoDB to one region
My DynamoDB conformance suite took one AWS region as ground truth. Then that region started accepting a value the rest of AWS rejected, and weeks later reverted it. AWS ships changes region by region, so one region was never a safe baseline.
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Dynoxide 0.11.3: closing a Windows port hijack
Issue #23 asked for a Windows socket option investigation. It found the opposite problem: dynoxide's ports could be hijacked by a same-user process. 0.11.3 closes that, and the test suite now runs on Windows for the first time.
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Dynoxide 0.11.2: a stack of conformance fixes
Last week I pinned what a conditional DynamoDB transaction costs against real AWS. Dynoxide 0.11.2 makes the engine report the same numbers, fixes an UpdateTable bug that dropped your table keys, and closes a stack of projection and validation gaps.
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What a conditional DynamoDB transaction actually costs
Does a conditional write inside a DynamoDB transaction cost read capacity on top of the write, or is it write all the way down? The docs aren't clear, so I ran it against real DynamoDB and pinned what it costs, re-checked on every run.
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Dynoxide 0.11.1: four conformance fixes
A small dynoxide patch. Four fixes where the engine evaluated an expression or validated a number a bit differently from real DynamoDB, most of them checked back against real AWS.
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Learn DynamoDB by running it - accesspatterns.dev
DynamoDB is a brilliant database and a hard one to learn. So I built accesspatterns.dev - a real engine in a browser tab where you learn it by running it, from your first GetItem to single-table design. No AWS account, nothing to install.
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Dynoxide 0.11.0: wasm on npm, plus a stack of fixes
Dynoxide 0.11.0 packages the browser engine as @dynoxide/wasm-engine - npm install and run a DynamoDB engine client-side - and a stack of correctness fixes, most of them turned up by the conformance suite.
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I watched DynamoDB change under my conformance suite
The reference in my DynamoDB conformance suite went red: real AWS had reworded its validation errors. Two regions have the new wording, two still have the old - a rollout caught mid-flight, with the suite watching the reference move.
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Build the squad. Own the platform. The org chart will catch up.
Once the technology works, deploying AI agents becomes an organisational problem - where it lives, who owns it, who carries the risk. My answer: build a deployment squad, own the platform, and let the org chart catch up.
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