Insights, articles and news

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24th

Jul

2025

Copying & Pasting 2.0: Why AI Isn’t Taking My Job

by James Ridgway

At a recent Sheffield AI meetup, I gave a talk that aimed to unpack a big question: Is AI coming for your job? Short answer? No. But not for the reasons you might think. Rather than fall into the trap of hyperbole, I approached the topic by stepping back and asking a different question: How have the skills and resources around building software changed over time?Read More

24th

Jul

2025

Copying & Pasting 2.0: Why AI Isn’t Taking My Job

by James Ridgway

At a recent Sheffield AI meetup, I gave a talk that aimed to unpack a big question: Is AI coming for your job? Short answer? No. But not for the reasons you might think. Rather than fall into the trap of hyperbole, I approached the topic by stepping back and asking a different question: How have the skills and resources around building software changed over time?Read More

8th

Apr

2025

Making Dockerised Web Application Serverless with AWS Lambda and AWS API Gateway

by 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).Read More

3rd

Apr

2025

The Myth of the “Perfect” MVP: Why MVPs Are Often Too Fat

by James Ridgway

We’re often engaged by our clients to develop Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) of a given product or system. More often than not we see a common and recurring problem with the original brief – the “MVP” is packed full of features of varying shapes and sizes.Read More

1st

Mar

2025

Story Points Explained – A Comprehensive Guide

by James Ridgway

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.Read More

26th

Jan

2025

Approving Builds and Workflows with GitHub Actions and Microsoft Teams

by James Ridgway

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 approval process.Read More

22nd

Jan

2025

Fixing “unexpected stream termination” with Jenkins build agents

by James Ridgway

We use continuous integration and continuous deployment techniques regularly in the delivery of our projects. Whilst our team predominantly uses GitHub Actions these days, we’ve supported a variety of CI tooling including Jenkins and GitLab Pipelines.Read More

19th

Jan

2025

The Challenges of Estimating Software

by James Ridgway

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.Read More

28th

Oct

2024

Total Cost of Ownership in IoT

by James Ridgway

September was a busy month for us at The Curve, but Paul and I were able to get some time out of the office to attend The Things Conference in Amsterdam.Read More

IoT

27th

Sep

2024

Main Image

Five Common Pitfalls of Building a Product

by James Ridgway

At The Curve, we build products for our clients. These could be business systems that are used by internal stakeholders that we develop using a product mindset, or B2C products our clients then use with their own customers.Read More

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