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By James Ridgway

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Understanding the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA): The New Standard for Digital Product Security

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by James Ridgway

The European Union will be introducing the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) from September 2026 which is set to fundamentally transform how technology products are designed, sold, and maintained. The CRA is a landmark regulation that establishes mandatory, horizontal cybersecurity requirements for all products with digital elements (PDEs) placed on the EU market. For any company developing, manufacturing, importing, or distributing connected hardware and software, understanding the CRA is now a critical business imperative.

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15th

September 2025

Data News
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What Is a Software Bill of Materials — and Why It Matters for Security and Compliance

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by James Ridgway

In modern software development, particularly in connected devices and IoT systems, security isn’t just a nice-to-have — it’s a fundamental requirement. As supply chains become more complex and regulatory standards tighten, understanding what’s inside your software is now just as important as knowing how it works. That’s where a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) comes in.

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11th

September 2025

Software Development

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

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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?

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24th

July 2025

API Software Development

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

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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).

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8th

April 2025

Software Development

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

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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.

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3rd

April 2025

Data MVP Software Development

Story Points Explained – A Comprehensive Guide

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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.

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1st

March 2025

Software Development

Approving Builds and Workflows with GitHub Actions and Microsoft Teams

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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.

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26th

January 2025

Software Development

Fixing “unexpected stream termination” with Jenkins build agents

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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.

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22nd

January 2025

Software Development

The Challenges of Estimating Software

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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.

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19th

January 2025

Software Development

Total Cost of Ownership in IoT

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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.

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28th

October 2024

IoT Events Software Development