James Ridgway

Latest Posts

The Things IoT Conference 2024 Roundup

This year, I was fortunate enough to attend The Things Conference in Amsterdam – a conference dedicated to the development and application of the Internet of Things (IoT) and LoRaWAN technology.

Probabilistic Data Structures

Frequency Analysis at Scale with Count-Min Sketch

Using precise methods for counting the frequency of events in a data stream becomes infeasible with large volumes. Precise counting methods at scale often require a significant amount of memory

Home Automation

Controlling Zigbee Lights with a Shelly Detached Switch

Throughout the house, nearly every single light is controlled by a Shelly. Last year, we installed a UniFi G4 Video Doorbell, and whilst we were having this fitted, it made

Probabilistic Data Structures

Scaling Large Applications with Bloom Filters

Querying large datasets can often be challenging, especially when performance is a key concern. Achieving performance at scale often comes with an element of trade-off in how a system is

Home Automation

Using Helpers to Abstract Complex Logic in Home Assistant

I have a handful of helpers in my Home Assistant setup that track the basic state of a few things. For example, we have a simple "guest mode"

Home Automation

UniFi Doorbell Chime Sounds with Amazon Alexa and Home Assistant

When I first got my UniFi G4 Doorbell, I originally set up Home Assistant to announce, "There is someone at the door," using Amazon Alexa. More recently, I

Monitoring

Mastering Alert Fatigue: Avoiding the Monitoring and Alerting Pitfalls

Putting in place a successful monitoring solution goes far beyond just picking an appropriate tool (such as Icinga, Nagios, Zabbix, etc). The success and effectiveness of monitoring systems rely on

Welcome

Hi, I’m James Ridgway. Welcome to my blog, where I write about the areas of software development that I’m passionate about. I care deeply about producing quality-focused and maintainable software.

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I enjoy sharing my work, ideas, projects and experiments with others, so please leave comments, or feel free to contact me directly as I’d love to hear from you.

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I am co-founder and CTO of The Curve, a Sheffield based software consultancy.

thecurve.io

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