James Ridgway Modern cloud environments provide several different mechanisms and services for deploying a web application. In a more traditional scenario, an application may be deployed to a bare metal server or a virtual machine (VM). The rise and success of Docker have led many cloud platforms to offer means of hosting dockerised applications without having to … Read more
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
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
Estimating the effort involved in any project can be a challenge, and software projects are no different. Arriving at an accurate estimate and plan is tricky, to get right. At the start of any project, there is a large amount of uncertainty and numerous assumptions that have to be tackled. These can be refined over … Read more
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
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
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
Photo by Maik Jonietz on Unsplash Earlier last week, we learned that Ruby’s built-in net/http library contains a fundamental limitation — net/http does not automatically handle redirect status codes (3xx). As part of a feature sprint for a client, we had been tackling some functionality around PDFs issued by their system using wicked_pdf, which can generate PDFs from … Read more
In the quest to promote a culture and ethos of excellence and quality within the dev team at The Curve, it goes without saying that we should have a set of coding standards and best practices under which we operate. Not process for process sake, but a set of guidelines where everyone knows the expected … Read more
Using a Bastion or gateway host can be one of the quickest security measures that you can use to reduce the attach surface of resources running within your cloud environment. The idea of a Bastion host is fairly simple. A Bastion host is used to allow operational or internal access to resources within your cloud … Read more
