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

The Dynoxide hexagonal logo centred on a near-black background 2nd July 2026

Dynoxide 0.11.2: a stack of conformance fixes

Last week I pinned what a conditional DynamoDB transaction costs against real AWS. Dynoxide 0.11.2 makes the engine report the same numbers, fixes an UpdateTable bug that dropped your table keys, and closes a stack of projection and validation gaps.

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The teal Parity Suite logo centred on a near-black background, with the paritysuite.org wordmark in white beneath it 1st July 2026

What a conditional DynamoDB transaction actually costs

Does a conditional write inside a DynamoDB transaction cost read capacity on top of the write, or is it write all the way down? The docs aren't clear, so I ran it against real DynamoDB and pinned what it costs, re-checked on every run.

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The Dynoxide hexagonal logo centred on a near-black background 26th June 2026

Dynoxide 0.11.1: four conformance fixes

A small dynoxide patch. Four fixes where the engine evaluated an expression or validated a number a bit differently from real DynamoDB, most of them checked back against real AWS.

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A faded screenshot of the accesspatterns.dev playground console with the accesspatterns.dev wordmark overlaid, in the dark oxide theme 25th June 2026

Learn DynamoDB by running it - accesspatterns.dev

DynamoDB is a brilliant database and a hard one to learn. So I built accesspatterns.dev - a real engine in a browser tab where you learn it by running it, from your first GetItem to single-table design. No AWS account, nothing to install.

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