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

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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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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