While FluentDynamoDB remains in a hackathon code freeze, we thought we'd bring a small early holiday gift to the community by open-sourcing some internal tooling we've already built for our SaaS platform.
FluentDynamoDB has come a long way from its origins as a small internal helper library. What began as a verbose, hand-crafted collection of table definitions, mapping code, and string-based expression builders has evolved—under real production needs and the pressure of the Kiroween 2025 competition—into a fully source-generated, strongly-typed, expression-driven DynamoDB framework. This post walks through that transformation step by step, highlighting the major design pivots, the problems each phase solved, and how FluentDynamoDB grew into the modern developer experience it offers today.
Today marks an important milestone: FluentDynamoDB is now available on NuGet.
This release represents the first public version of a fully source-generated, strongly-typed, AoT-compatible C# interface for Amazon DynamoDB — designed for production workloads and modern serverless architectures.
We’re excited to share that FluentDynamoDB has been officially submitted to the Kiroween 2025 Hackathon, sponsored by AWS Kiro. While this project is much larger than a typical hackathon entry, the event provided a great opportunity to showcase the development workflow we’ve been using behind the scenes.
Kiro is a Visual Studio Code fork from AWS that brings deep AI capabilities directly into the IDE. It isn’t “just another coding assistant.” It’s a different way of building software—one where planning, architecture, and implementation all flow through an AI-augmented workflow.
When we started FluentDynamoDB, we knew the scope would be massive: source generators, indexing logic, AOT-safe expression compilation, geospatial search, encryption, stream processing, and thousands of tests. Kiro became the only viable way to deliver something this ambitious with the quality level we required.
I'm Dan Guisinger, founder of Oproto, a small business financial platform built on a fully serverless, event-driven architecture. As we developed our microservices, we ran head-first into a familiar challenge for .NET developers:
DynamoDB is powerful, but the AWS SDK is painfully verbose, low-level, and easy to get wrong.
We needed something that made DynamoDB feel native to .NET — strongly typed, expressive, source-generated, and optimized for production workloads, not just demos.
That need eventually grew into FluentDynamoDB.