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

Strands of warm amber and orange light converging from the left into a single bright point on the right, against a near-black background 3rd June 2026

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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Illustration of the Dynoxide logo with DynamoDB table icons on a dark background 29th May 2026

Dynoxide 0.10.0: it runs in the browser now

The same DynamoDB engine now runs in a browser tab on OPFS, there's an official ~5 MB Docker image, and a storage-backend trait sits underneath it all. The biggest dynoxide release since the engine itself, and the first that breaks things.

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Minimal illustration of an Apple M-series-style silicon chip on a dark background, with amber circuit traces around a central core-grid die 28th May 2026

Running iai-callgrind on Apple Silicon

iai-callgrind needs Valgrind. Valgrind has zero Apple Silicon support. Here's the native arm64 Docker workaround I use to run deterministic instruction-count benchmarks locally - seccomp trap, --locked gotcha and all.

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Social card for Parity Suite (paritysuite.org), the DynamoDB conformance suite that scores emulators against live AWS DynamoDB 26th May 2026

How close is your DynamoDB emulator to AWS?

My DynamoDB conformance suite has a site now. Eight emulators, 684 tests, all scored against live AWS DynamoDB, with fresh results every run - standings, per-target history and the full matrix included.

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