James Ridgway

What are WebSockets, and Why Are They Essential for IoT?

Advances in IoT (The Internet of Things) technology has revolutionised the way devices interact with each other and with us. From smart homes to industrial automation, IoT devices rely on continuous, real-time communication to operate efficiently and effectively.  WebSockets, is a realtime communication protocol designed for full-duplex communication over a single TCP connection. WebSockets can … Read more

Understanding WebTransport and Its Advantages Over WebSockets in the IoT Landscape

As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to expand, the need for efficient, reliable, and scalable communication protocols becomes increasingly crucial. WebSockets have been a popular choice for real-time communication between devices and servers, but a new contender, WebTransport, is emerging as a powerful alternative. This blog post delves into what WebTransport is, how it … Read more

Understanding the Cold Start Problem with AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda and Azure Functions are popular Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) offerings and are a staple of the serverless landscape.  With FaaS offerings the cloud provider is responsible for running and managing the underlying compute that powers the service. This allows you to focus solely on building out your function. These serverless platforms automatically scale resources based … Read more

Story Points Explained – A Comprehensive Guide

Story points estimation is an estimation method that is often used in agile software development. Story points are a unit of measure used in agile project management to estimate and compare the complexity, effort, and relative size of features or user stories within a project. Instead of providing precise time-based estimates, teams assign story points collaboratively, … Read more

Approving Builds and Workflows with GitHub Actions and Microsoft Teams

Sometimes it can be useful to request a manual approval before a deploy is unleashed on production. GitHub supports manual approval when you use environments, but only on public repositories or private repositories for GitHub Enterprise. In this post, I look at how GitHub Actions and Microsoft Teams can be used to create a manual … Read more

What we’ve learned from processing £100k+ of transactions every week

We process several hundred thousand pounds of transactions for our clients every week. During peak periods, we’ll process this volume in a single day alone, and in exceptional cases, within a few minutes. Taking money from customers may sound simple, but there are many different factors and facets that have to be considered when designing … Read more

Demystifying Agile Software Development

Agile has been a popular software development methodology since the early 2000s. Despite being around for over two decades, agile can still be misunderstood or incorrectly applied. What is Agile? Agile software development is rooted in the Agile Manifesto, which was established in February 2001 following a meeting by a prominent set of individuals from … Read more

Technical Literacy: Understanding “Technical Debt”

So what is Technical Debt? Who you ask will likely influence the answer that you get. Different perspectives will emphasise different aspects of the definition of “Technical Debt”. In this article, we dive into what is meant by technical debt and why, on occasion, seemingly simple changes can take more time to implement than you’d … Read more