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 a small server with radiating network connections on a dark grid background 2nd May 2026

A year with my Intel N100 home server: what changed

A year on from the £250 N100 server build. The boring infrastructure won. Unbound got removed, Tailscale earned its place, and the disk debate I lost sleep over turned out not to matter.

Read article →
DynamoDB Conformance Suite social card showing 526 tests validated against real DynamoDB with pass rates for each emulator 13th April 2026

Building a DynamoDB conformance suite

AWS doesn't ship a conformance suite for DynamoDB emulators, so I built one. 526 tests, ground-truthed against real DynamoDB. Dynoxide passes all of them. DynamoDB Local fails 42.

Read article →
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.

Read article →
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.

Read article →
View all articles →