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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?

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

On the 19th July 2024, the world witnessed what could easily be described as the largest global outage IT outage in history when CrowdStrike, a cyber security solutions provider, shipped a defective security update that impacted an estimated 8.5 million Windows computers worldwide.