Insights, articles and news
By James Ridgway

What Is a Software Bill of Materials — and Why It Matters for Security and Compliance
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.
11th
September 2025
Copying & Pasting 2.0: Why AI Isn’t Taking My Job
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?
24th
July 2025
Making Dockerised Web Application Serverless with AWS Lambda and AWS API Gateway
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).
8th
April 2025
The Myth of the “Perfect” MVP: Why MVPs Are Often Too Fat
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.
3rd
April 2025
Story Points Explained – A Comprehensive Guide
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.
1st
March 2025
Approving Builds and Workflows with GitHub Actions and Microsoft Teams
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.
26th
January 2025
Fixing “unexpected stream termination” with Jenkins build agents
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.
22nd
January 2025
The Challenges of Estimating Software
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.
19th
January 2025
Total Cost of Ownership in IoT
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.
28th
October 2024

Five Common Pitfalls of Building a Product
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.
27th
September 2024
