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 alongside a security shield on a dark background 12th May 2026

Filing my first security advisory

Logged into GitHub yesterday, hit a Dependabot alert on dynoxide, ended up filing my first GHSA. Here's what I'd tell past-me about the form, the order of operations, and the bug itself.

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The Dynoxide hexagonal logo centred on a black background 5th May 2026

Dynoxide patch notes: 0.9.10 to 0.9.12

Notes from the latest stretch of dynoxide patch releases - what shipped, what got fixed, and the takeaways.

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Illustration of a small server with radiating network connections on a dark grid background 2nd May 2026

A year with my Intel N100 home server: what changed

A year on from the £250 N100 server build. The boring infrastructure won. Unbound got removed, Tailscale earned its place, and the disk debate I lost sleep over turned out not to matter.

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DynamoDB Conformance Suite social card showing 526 tests validated against real DynamoDB with pass rates for each emulator 13th April 2026

Building a DynamoDB conformance suite

AWS doesn't ship a conformance suite for DynamoDB emulators, so I built one. 526 tests, ground-truthed against real DynamoDB. Dynoxide passes all of them. DynamoDB Local fails 42.

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