A black and white portrait photo of Martin Hicks.

Software developer & AWS consultant.

Hello. I'm Martin, a software developer and entrepreneur based in Manchester, England.

I'm a co-founder of Si Novi, where we build cloud-native applications and consult on AWS architecture. I also build tools for DynamoDB - including Dynoxide and Nubo.


Latest posts

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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