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 Parity Suite logo, a teal rounded square with three descending bars, on a near-black background above the paritysuite.org wordmark 13th August 2026

Parity Suite 3.0.0: measuring the wrong thing

The board scored emulators on a pass rate over what they attempted, so a score could jump 8 points without the engine changing a line. 3.0.0 replaces that with two figures, letter grades, and 56 new tests.

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A scattered cloud of glowing amber points on a near-black background, with one bright point at the centre joined to its three closest neighbours by thin lines 13th August 2026

When a DynamoDB vector index is actually ready

AWS's docs contradict each other about what searching a backfilling vector index does, describe a state the index never enters, and name a readiness signal that arrives too early. Here's what I measured instead.

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The Parity Suite logo, a teal rounded square with three descending bars, on a near-black background above the paritysuite.org wordmark 13th August 2026

What a write to an indexed DynamoDB table costs

Adding a GSI to a DynamoDB table doubles the cost of some writes and changes nothing about others, and which is which isn't well documented. So I measured it against real DynamoDB and pinned every number.

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The Dynoxide hexagonal logo centred on a near-black background 28th July 2026

Dynoxide 0.12.0: PartiQL RETURNING, wasm conformance

RETURNING finally does something, the wasm build lands on the conformance board at 100% over three quarters of the suite, and PartiQL UPDATE stops creating rows it shouldn't.

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