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 Parity Suite logo, a teal rounded square with three descending bars, on a near-black background above the paritysuite.org wordmark 13th August 2026

Parity Suite 3.0.0: measuring the wrong thing

The board scored emulators on a pass rate over what they attempted, so a score could jump 8 points without the engine changing a line. 3.0.0 replaces that with two figures, letter grades, and 56 new tests.

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A scattered cloud of glowing amber points on a near-black background, with one bright point at the centre joined to its three closest neighbours by thin lines 13th August 2026

When a DynamoDB vector index is actually ready

AWS's docs contradict each other about what searching a backfilling vector index does, describe a state the index never enters, and name a readiness signal that arrives too early. Here's what I measured instead.

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The Parity Suite logo, a teal rounded square with three descending bars, on a near-black background above the paritysuite.org wordmark 13th August 2026

What a write to an indexed DynamoDB table costs

Adding a GSI to a DynamoDB table doubles the cost of some writes and changes nothing about others, and which is which isn't well documented. So I measured it against real DynamoDB and pinned every number.

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The Dynoxide hexagonal logo centred on a near-black background 28th July 2026

Dynoxide 0.12.0: PartiQL RETURNING, wasm conformance

RETURNING finally does something, the wasm build lands on the conformance board at 100% over three quarters of the suite, and PartiQL UPDATE stops creating rows it shouldn't.

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The teal Parity Suite logo centred on a near-black background, with the paritysuite.org wordmark in white beneath it 17th July 2026

You can't pin DynamoDB to one region

My DynamoDB conformance suite took one AWS region as ground truth. Then that region started accepting a value the rest of AWS rejected, and weeks later reverted it. AWS ships changes region by region, so one region was never a safe baseline.

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The Dynoxide hexagonal logo centred on a near-black background 5th July 2026

Dynoxide 0.11.3: closing a Windows port hijack

Issue #23 asked for a Windows socket option investigation. It found the opposite problem: dynoxide's ports could be hijacked by a same-user process. 0.11.3 closes that, and the test suite now runs on Windows for the first time.

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