A black and white portrait photo of Martin Hicks.

Journal

Notes from real projects - AWS, DynamoDB, Rust, home servers, and whatever open source tool I'm currently building.


The Dynoxide hexagonal logo alongside a security shield on a dark background 12th May 2026

Filing my first security advisory

Logged into GitHub yesterday, hit a Dependabot alert on dynoxide, ended up filing my first GHSA. Here's what I'd tell past-me about the form, the order of operations, and the bug itself.

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The Dynoxide hexagonal logo centred on a black background 5th May 2026

Dynoxide patch notes: 0.9.10 to 0.9.12

Notes from the latest stretch of dynoxide patch releases - what shipped, what got fixed, and the takeaways.

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Illustration of a small server with radiating network connections on a dark grid background 2nd May 2026

A year with my Intel N100 home server: what changed

A year on from the £250 N100 server build. The boring infrastructure won. Unbound got removed, Tailscale earned its place, and the disk debate I lost sleep over turned out not to matter.

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DynamoDB Conformance Suite social card showing 526 tests validated against real DynamoDB with pass rates for each emulator 13th April 2026

Building a DynamoDB conformance suite

AWS doesn't ship a conformance suite for DynamoDB emulators, so I built one. 526 tests, ground-truthed against real DynamoDB. Dynoxide passes all of them. DynamoDB Local fails 42.

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The Dynoxide hexagon logo alongside the npm logo on a dark background 6th April 2026

Dynoxide 0.9.8: fixing the orphan problem

If you backgrounded dynoxide in an npm script, killing the dev server left it running. 0.9.8 fixes three root causes so the process actually dies when it should.

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Illustration of the Dynoxide logo with DynamoDB table icons on a dark background 2nd April 2026

Introducing Dynoxide: a fast, embeddable DynamoDB engine

I built a DynamoDB engine in Rust that starts in 15ms and passes 526 conformance tests. Here's why, and what it's for.

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Terminal showing automated YouTube Shorts pipeline commands with fetch-fixtures, encode-short and upload-short output 21st March 2026

Automating my son's YouTube with Python and FFmpeg

My son wanted a YouTube channel. I wanted to make sure I wasn't the bottleneck. Here's how I automated the entire weekly workflow with Python, the FPL API, Whisper, FFmpeg, and the YouTube Data API.

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Browser mockup showing the Recently Played Last.fm widget with album artwork and track listings 8th March 2026

Recently Played: bringing back my Last.fm component

I had a Last.fm widget on my site in 2010. Fifteen years later, I brought it back as an Eleventy WebC component with SSR, live polling, and localStorage caching.

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Illustration of a lock surrounded by device icons connected through a VPN tunnel 28th July 2025

WireGuard for safe browsing on kids' devices

Kids' devices leave the home network. WireGuard tunnels their DNS back through home filtering - everywhere, automatically.

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Illustration of a shield with a checkmark surrounded by DNS query flow lines 20th July 2025

Running AdGuard Home and Unbound on a home server

AdGuard Home handles the filtering, Unbound handles the resolving. Together they give you private, ad-free DNS for your whole network.

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