Insights, articles and news

By James Ridgway

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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
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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