Here’s a simple snippet for connecting to a DynamoDB Local instance from boto:

Remember that unless you use the --inMemory flag when starting DynamoDB Local, it will store your database on disk. The file name will be called accesskey_region.db and it will reside in the directory where you launch DynamoDB Local (you can define another directory using --dbPath). Therefore it makes sense to set a good name in the aws_access_key_id parameter, even though the credentials aren’t checked in DynamoDB Local.

After running Octopress for almost two years I have now decided to switch over to bare metal Jekyll. The blog will still be hosted at GitHub Pages, as that’s running Jekyll too :).

The theme is hpstr with almost no modifications (only some minor tweaking of the Gist styling).

I’ve started to use Atom extensively for NodeJS development. Having a good linting tool is crucial for me when developing, so I wanted to share my Atom setup. I use Linter with the linter-jshint plugin. You can easily install both packages directly via Atoms settings page.

JSHint is highly flexible and it can be configured to match your needs. I have a setup that I think works well for NodeJS development, but it’s not holy in any way so feel free to change it to match your taste. You should have a .jshintrc file in your projects’ root folder. Here’s what my .jshintrc looks like:

{
  "globals"   : {
    "describe"   : false,
    "it"         : false,
    "before"     : false,
    "beforeEach" : false,
    "after"      : false,
    "afterEach"  : false
  },
  "camelcase": true,
  "curly": true,
  "eqeqeq": true,
  "freeze": true,
  "indent": 2,
  "latedef": true,
  "laxcomma": true,
  "node": true,
  "trailing": true,
  "strict": true,
  "unused": "vars",
  "undef": true
}

There are also a few options for the linter-jshint plugin available directly on the Atom settings page for the package. You can for example determine when JSHint should validate your file and how you want to see the errors.

Happy coding!

I was invited to give a talk about Dynamic DynamoDB at an AWS NoSQL event in San Francisco earlier this week. The event was quite crowded and it was really great to discuss details in NoSQL implementations with other nerds in the industry. The slides from the presentation are now available at SlideShare.

Dynamic DynamoDB version 1.10.0 has now been released. The latest update introduces two new features:

• SNS notifications
• EC2 Instance Profile authentication

The two new features are described below. Please report any issues at the project GitHub page. All general feedback is also welcome as comments here or tweets to .

SNS notifications

The new SNS support makes it possible for you to configure a SNS topic to which Dynamic DynamoDB should send it’s notifications. You can then subscripe to that topic in order to get e.g. email or HTTP requests on certain events. Initially Dynamic DynamoDB supports the following events:

• Scale up events (scale-up)
• Scale down events (scale-down)

Configure SNS notifications on a per table or global secondary index basis. Here’s an example:

Previously Dynamic DynamoDB supported fetching the AWS access keys using the command line parameters, the configuration file or environment variables (or any method supported by boto). With the release of 1.10.0 we introduce support for EC2 Instance Profile credentials as well, so Dynamic DynamoDB can inherit the credentials assigned to your EC2 instance.

Happy hacking!