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 hexagon logo alongside the npm logo on a dark background 6th April 2026

Dynoxide 0.9.8: fixing the orphan problem

If you backgrounded dynoxide in an npm script, killing the dev server left it running. 0.9.8 fixes three root causes so the process actually dies when it should.

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Illustration of the Dynoxide logo with DynamoDB table icons on a dark background 2nd April 2026

Introducing Dynoxide: a fast, embeddable DynamoDB engine

I built a DynamoDB engine in Rust that starts in 15ms and passes 526 conformance tests. Here's why, and what it's for.

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Terminal showing automated YouTube Shorts pipeline commands with fetch-fixtures, encode-short and upload-short output 21st March 2026

Automating my son's YouTube with Python and FFmpeg

My son wanted a YouTube channel. I wanted to make sure I wasn't the bottleneck. Here's how I automated the entire weekly workflow with Python, the FPL API, Whisper, FFmpeg, and the YouTube Data API.

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Browser mockup showing the Recently Played Last.fm widget with album artwork and track listings 8th March 2026

Recently Played: bringing back my Last.fm component

I had a Last.fm widget on my site in 2010. Fifteen years later, I brought it back as an Eleventy WebC component with SSR, live polling, and localStorage caching.

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