Software Development insights, articles and news

In conversations about software reliability, availability targets are often expressed with reassuring simplicity: “We’re aiming for five nines.” Yet behind that short phrase lies one of the most complex, expensive, and nuanced challenges in software engineering.

In many boardrooms, conversations about regulatory compliance and software sound deceptively simple: “We need to comply with GDPR.”, “Our system must support ISO 27001.”, “We have to meet FCA reporting requirements.”.

Building software isn’t just about writing code, it’s about delivering something that works reliably, scales effectively, and provides a great experience for users. Too often, testing is treated as a final checkbox before launch.

Designing great software is not just about how it looks. It is about how it works for the people who use it. Regardless of the demographic of the user base it's important to create an experience that feels intuitive, accessible, and empowering from the very first click.

In software development, one of the most common traps organisations fall into is trying to build everything at once. The result is often a long, expensive project that takes months (or years) to deliver, and when it finally arrives, it’s bloated with features nobody actually uses.

Data is now central to how organisations operate, compete, and grow. But before you can turn that data into insight, you need the right foundation.

Data is now woven into the fabric of how organisations operate. It holds the answers to better decisions, smarter products, and new opportunities, but only if it’s organised in a way that makes those answers accessible.

Data is now one of the most valuable assets any organisation has. But before it can power smarter decisions, predictive models, or new digital products, it needs a place to live that is flexible enough to handle everything you throw at it.

How The Curve used Blecon’s low‑power BLE stack and gateways to deliver robust people and asset tracking in sparse, off‑grid environments—summarised from a conversation between our CTO, James, and Blecon’s CEO, Simon Ford.

Organisations are generating more data than ever before - through customer interactions, operations, financial systems, and digital products. Without the right approach, this information ends up siloed, inconsistent, or underused. A data warehouse provides a structured, centralised environment that brings all of this together. It doesn’t just solve technical challenges; it enables leaders to make better decisions, build trust in reporting, and create new opportunities for growth and innovation. In many cases, it also provides the foundation for more advanced initiatives such as automation, reporting dashboards and AI. There are many benefits to adopting a data warehouse, which I’ll cover below:.

Connected devices are everywhere — from smart speakers and security cameras in our homes to sensors, gateways, and wearables powering entire industries. But as our reliance on connected technology has grown, so too has the threat landscape. Vulnerabilities in consumer devices have become one of the most common entry points for cyberattacks, often due to poor security design, weak default credentials, and a lack of long-term support. To address this, the UK government has introduced the Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure (PSTI) Act 2022 — legislation that sets legally enforceable security requirements for consumer connectable products. While similar in spirit to the EU’s Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), PSTI is the UK’s standalone approach to raising the baseline for IoT security and ensuring manufacturers take responsibility for the products they sell.

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.

A Minimum Deliverable Value (MDV) is a lightweight, functional outcome that tests a core assumption or delivers operational insight without the bloat of a full MVP. This is ideal for validating a specific assumption, exploring a technical opportunity, or demonstrating early value before investing in a larger, traditional MVP or product build.

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).

At The Curve we do a lot of talking about “The Internet of Things”, we offer IoT consultancy services, we even host IoT events, and at the office, there’s more often than not, a half-assembled “thing” sitting on a desk waiting for its life as a connected internet device to begin.

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.

As a recently appointed Freeman at the Company of Cutlers in Hallamshire, The Curve were given the opportunity to attend their regular monthly Tuesday Breakfast members event, and present a topic which gives rise to some of the most pressing challenges and opportunities facing companies today.

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.

In this post we take a quick look at the gadgets featured during The Curve’s demo at our first in-person event that we hosted the other week as well as a few of the considerations that went into the design, build and software.

What is the HubSpot API? HubSpot provides a standard REST API as well as webhooks. The webhooks allow the custom integration to be notified of changes from HubSpot efficiently without the need for polling the API, whilst the API allows the integration to create, read and modify the data in HubSpot.

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.