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

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.

Read article →
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.

Read article →
Social card for Parity Suite (paritysuite.org), the DynamoDB conformance suite that scores emulators against live AWS DynamoDB 26th May 2026

How close is your DynamoDB emulator to AWS?

My DynamoDB conformance suite has a site now. Eight emulators, 684 tests, all scored against live AWS DynamoDB, with fresh results every run - standings, per-target history and the full matrix included.

Read article →
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.

Read article →
View all articles →