Software Development insights, articles and news

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Attendee Tracking on Blecon: A Behind‑the‑Booth Look at Our Demo

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by Paul Ridgway

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.

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1st

October 2025

IoT Events Partnerships Software Development Data
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Unleashing the Power of Data: The Benefits of Building a Data Warehouse

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by James Ridgway

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:.

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26th

September 2025

Data Software Development
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Understanding the UK PSTI Act 2022: Raising the Bar for Connected Product Security

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by James Ridgway

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.

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25th

September 2025

Software Development Data
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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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23rd

September 2025

Software Development

From MVP to MDV: A Leaner Path to Value

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by Paul Ridgway

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.

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18th

August 2025

MVP 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

What are some of the “things” in the Internet of Things?

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by Ed Hardie

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.

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3rd

April 2025

IoT 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
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Digital & AI Transformation for South Yorkshire Manufacturing

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by Mai Mai Steele

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.

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18th

March 2025

Networking Events 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

The IoT Gadgets

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by Paul Ridgway

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.

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14th

November 2024

IoT Events Software Development

Understanding HubSpot’s API and its uses

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by Jake Appleyard

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.

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12th

November 2024

API Data 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
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Five Common Pitfalls of Building a Product

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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.

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27th

September 2024

MVP Software Development
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Unpacking the CrowdStrike Outage: What It Signals for the Future of IT Resilience

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by James Ridgway

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.

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12th

August 2024

Software Development News Data
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Unusual IoT Use Cases to Improve Business Performance

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by Jake Appleyard

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a network of devices or objects that contain or are made up of a variety of sensors and other data gathering technologies that can connect and share information with one another as well as sharing data with other devices through an internet connection.

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31st

July 2024

IoT Data Software Development
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What are WebSockets, and Why Are They Essential for IoT?

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by James Ridgway

Advances in IoT (The Internet of Things) technology has revolutionised the way devices interact with each other and with us. From smart homes to industrial automation, IoT devices rely on continuous, real-time communication to operate efficiently and effectively.

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6th

June 2024

IoT Data Software Development

Understanding WebTransport and Its Advantages Over WebSockets in the IoT Landscape

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by James Ridgway

As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to expand, the need for efficient, reliable, and scalable communication protocols becomes increasingly crucial. WebSockets have been a popular choice for real-time communication between devices and servers, but a new contender, WebTransport, is emerging as a powerful alternative. This blog post delves into what WebTransport is, how it works, and why it represents a significant improvement over WebSockets, especially in the context of IoT.

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6th

June 2024

IoT Data Software Development

Understanding the Cold Start Problem with AWS Lambda

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by James Ridgway

AWS Lambda and Azure Functions are popular Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) offerings and are a staple of the serverless landscape. With FaaS offerings the cloud provider is responsible for running and managing the underlying compute that powers the service.

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3rd

May 2024

Data Software Development

Building for ARM with Docker – packaging libcamera-apps for Alpine on armv7

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by Paul Ridgway

In this article we look at compiling applications for different CPU architectures using Docker to emulate on an x86 host, with a working example of packaging libcamera-apps for Alpine Linux for an armv7 device (a Raspberry Pi Zero) and armv8 (Raspberry Pi Zero 2).

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21st

January 2024

Software Development

Demystifying Agile Software Development

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by James Ridgway

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.

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15th

January 2024

Software Development

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