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 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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The Dynoxide hexagonal logo centred on a near-black background 25th June 2026

Dynoxide 0.11.0: wasm on npm, plus a stack of fixes

Dynoxide 0.11.0 packages the browser engine as @dynoxide/wasm-engine - npm install and run a DynamoDB engine client-side - and a stack of correctness fixes, most of them turned up by the conformance suite.

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A thin horizontal line of amber light on a near-black background, running level then stepping up to a slightly higher position partway across, as if a baseline has shifted underneath 9th June 2026

I watched DynamoDB change under my conformance suite

The reference in my DynamoDB conformance suite went red: real AWS had reworded its validation errors. Two regions have the new wording, two still have the old - a rollout caught mid-flight, with the suite watching the reference move.

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