Archives on Gordon Burgett | Director of Software Engineering, Albers Aerospace

Building on The Foundation

Sat, 13 Apr 2019 14:20:14 -0500

According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building upon it. Let each one take care how he builds upon it. For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. 1 Corinthians 3:10-11

What is it that we are building together with our partners in Albania? Why do you keep supporting me and my team in going back, now for the 7th year in a row? Firstly let me be clear that we are building nothing of our own, but rather we are building on the foundation that has already been laid. CRU has already done an amazing job of building up the Church in Albania, coming in shortly after Communism fell armed with nothing but the Gospel. Christ through them has laid the foundation of a small yet vibrant Church in Albania.

Acts 29

Wed, 11 Jul 2018 08:55:43 +0200

This month, while we’ve been working on the summer project here in Albania, I’ve been reading the book of Acts. I love all the descriptions in the book of Acts of faithful people who were not Apostles. Some of them, like Cornelius the centurion, had been faithful for a very long time, and God answered their prayers powefully.

About the ninth hour of the day he saw clearly in a vision an angel of God come in and say to him, “Cornelius.” And he stared at him in terror and said, “What is it, Lord?” And he said to him, “Your prayers and your alms have ascended as a memorial before God. … While Peter was still saying these things, the Holy Spirit fell on all who heard the word. And the believers from among the circumcised who had come with Peter were amazed, because the gift of the Holy Spirit was poured out even on the Gentiles. Acts 10:3-4,44-45

Feeling Like I'm at Hogwarts

Sun, 20 May 2018 14:52:15 -0500

I spent some time this week playing with Typescript 2.8’s new features for modeling various complex types. The new syntax that I wanted to play with was the conditional type syntax,

`1`	`T extends U ? X : Y`

This syntax allows you to express some really crazy type relationships! Some of the most interesting ones have been pre-defined in the Typescript standard lib:

Exclude<T, U> – Exclude from T those types that are assignable to U.
Extract<T, U> – Extract from T those types that are assignable to U.

I wanted to see if I could use these to model the way we’ve been working with return values from Contentful’s Content Delivery API.

Preparing for the Summer

Thu, 05 Apr 2018 20:18:22 -0700

It’s that time again! We’ve begun preparing to go back to Albania this summer!

Looking forward to going back

I’m so glad that I already had a chance to get back to Albania in December, when we put on a men’s conference for Cornerstone Church of Tirana. That was a great time of fun and fellowship with many of my close Albanian friends. I’ve been keeping in touch with them although it’s been difficult due to the time difference.

Men's Retreat in Albania

Thu, 14 Dec 2017 20:18:22 -0700

When I look back on my experience with Albania, starting from my first trip there in 2013 until now, I can’t help but be amazed at the way God has used this partnership to bring change not only in my life but in the lives of my friends. My key verse for my 2-year stint in Albania was Mark 10:29-30

“Truly I tell you,” Jesus replied, “no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—along with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. Mark 10:29-30

Not Done Yet!

Thu, 26 Oct 2017 20:28:57 -0600

Hey Y’all! It’s been a while! I’ve been busy with settling in to my new job and routine with Watermark. It’s a really great place to work and I feel super blessed to have the opportunity to join staff there! But even as I readjust to life in America I’m still looking back to Albania and my next opportunity to go.

And the Lord graciously provides! I will be going on a trip in December with Will Noll, Matt Rial, Chris Hyland, and hopefully 1 to 2 others. We have been communicating with the elders of Guri i Themelit church over there to set up a weekend guys’ retreat, where we will discuss openness and authenticity. They expect upwards of 50 guys to come out to this retreat!

Making a static site searchable

Sun, 23 Jul 2017 17:28:52 +0200

My site is getting pretty big now! 50+ posts, plus my journal entries from years past, I have content stretching over 4 years. So I started thinking about ways to add search functionality. And anyone who knows me knows I like to make these kind of things more complicated than they need to be, so with that in mind I had a fun challenge to solve. How do I add search functionality to a static site?

Home

Thu, 20 Jul 2017 11:38:22 +0200

My journal for the 2017 project is up!

photo by Lauren Dean

End of the road

All good things come to an end, and my STINT in Albania is no different. On 7 August I fly back to Dallas to spend at least 1 year there, with the hope that I’ll return to live in Albania sooner rather than later. At this point I’m holding all my plans loosely. I know what I want to do for the next year, but beyond that it’s up to God.

Big Decision

Sun, 18 Jun 2017 19:50:29 +0200

So, I’ve got an announcement to make. These past several months I’ve been exploring two options for my time after my STINT is up. One area I was exploring was with the Digital Strategies team in Albania, working for Afrim Karoshi. I went to a conference with the Digital Strategies team here in May as part of that exploration. The second area was an open position at Watermark Community Church as a programmer.

Digital Leadership

Mon, 08 May 2017 13:39:29 +0200

April was a fairly slow month. We had our normal schedule of a professional meeting and a social time. This month we had fewer people than normal, but we had a lot of new people which was very interesting. I’ve had several opportunities to follow up with contacts, though this appears to be a busy time of year for most of the professionals. We are trying more to model the follow-up process for our partners, inviting them into these meetings and giving them opportunities to lead. Albert has been doing a great job helping me mentor one of the new believers in the first steps of learning about his faith.

Modern Static Sites

Thu, 20 Apr 2017 13:49:22 +0200

Today in 2017, there are a thousand and one different ways to build a website. As always there’s good old fashioned Wordpress, and of course there’s drag-n-drop website builders like Wix. One thing these have in common is that they need a traditional hosting environment, and for that you gotta pay.

If you can manage it, the cheapest way to host a website nowadays is to create a static HTML site. But don’t hand-craft HTML, that’s hard and boring. Use a static site generator, for fun and profit!

March Project

Wed, 05 Apr 2017 22:08:16 +0200

We love momentum

March 13-17 was a big week for us. We invited a group from Louisville, TX To join us for a week-long momentum building project. This group had an amazing impact, we drew in well over 100 people for the seminar, and our social time was a big success as well. We got a lot of new contacts and, as was our goal, we will be following up with them over the coming weeks.

Automating more work

Tue, 21 Mar 2017 16:20:52 +0100

So I took a look at my blog recently to make sure everything is working, and got a big fat “Your connection is not secure” message. Uh oh!

Fortunately I just need to request a new certificate from Let’s Encrypt and install it. I’ve done this before, it’s a 10 minute job. Buuuuuttt… what if I could automate it? If I spend all afternoon on this I’ll save myself 15 minutes of work every 3 months! That math totally works out right?
What does the XKCD guy have to say about it?

TraNet 2017

Fri, 03 Mar 2017 14:36:09 +0100

What a great weekend! This past weekend we went to Cyprus for a conference about reaching leaders and influencers for Christ. The group was about 28 people, including 10 professionals, 4 teachers, two businesswomen and a government worker. It was a great time of learning and inspiring our partners to reach their peers for Christ.

One speaker was a bible teacher who took us through the book of Mark, highlighting the disciples’ stories and their leadership journeys. Another speaker was a professional business consultant who focuses on leadership training. Alba in particular got a lot out of that speaker, because she leads a team at her work. The third speaker was the vice president of Leader Impact worldwide, he introduced to us the concept and mission of TraNet. We also had various smaller seminars throughout, on interesting topics such as the Sabbath rest as applies to business, and integrating faith and work from a former communist perspective.

Continuing Resolve

Sat, 04 Feb 2017 19:05:49 +0100

Lots of stuff has happened this past month! Last I posted I was in the middle of a 2-week break in Dallas. That was a great and relaxing time for me, helped me to prepare mentally and spiritually for these next 7 months in Albania. I saw friends and family and enjoyed plenty of tacos.

When I got back it was right back into the swing of things with a seminar the next day. It was a video seminar, we showed Patrick Lencioni’s talk from the 2016 Global Leadership Summit.
It had already been subtitled in Albanian. The talk was great, but when we asked our partners afterwards for their feedback they said it would be better to have a live speaker in the future. So, as much as possible, we’ll try to do that.

Merry Christmas

Sun, 25 Dec 2016 04:56:31 +0100

Merry Christmas to everybody!

I love Christmas time, spending time with family, listening to the Advent messages at church, and especially the Christmas hymns. My favorite is ‘O Holy Night’. It’s my favorite because it speaks of the hope that came into the world when Jesus Christ was born. Hope is an elusive thing. Lots of people lose hope when what they desire becomes impossible, or even worse, when they get exactly what they wanted.

When you eat chili 3 days in a row

Mon, 21 Nov 2016 14:29:43 +0100

We’ve been working on follow up since Momentum Europe. We’ve had some good meetings with people, and had some good conversations. Of course our goal is to help our partners to do that more and more - to have the conversations that lead to Gospel presentations, to encourage them to share with and invite more people, and to build their confidence.

To that end we organized a training conference this past weekend. We invited about 20 young professionals out to Durres for 2 days of working through the “Bursting Your Bubble” curriculum. It was a great success! They enjoyed the time together and came away with a stronger desire to serve and share with their peers.

Momentum Europe

Sun, 23 Oct 2016 23:06:47 +0200

September and October have been pretty slow months, as we plan and gear up for our first big event, Momentum Europe. I’ve been busying myself with a lot of administrative work, but we’ve also had opportunity to begin training our committed believers.

Bursting your Bubble

In my opinion, our greatest success last year was finding 8 believers who have decided to commit to being part of our ministry. One of the things we asked of them is to commit to be trained in evangelism by our staff. We started that training this month with the series “Bursting Your Bubble”.

Taking Control of My Data

Sat, 17 Sep 2016 15:33:34 +0200

One of my projects during my vacation has been to take back control of my data. The question of online privacy is a difficult one, because while there’s some things you can do to improve your privacy, to really own your data takes a lot of effort and learning. For most people, hosting their own services is more headache than it’s worth. There’s a lot of good privacy-conscious services out there if you’re willing to pay, but most people are not willing to pay. The convenience trumps the privacy concerns, and for me it has been that way for a long time as well.

Summer Recap

Sun, 14 Aug 2016 15:30:48 +0200

Well, it’s been a crazy couple months! When I last posted we were about to start Ice and Spice, CRU Albania’s summer camp for high school students. As part of my role on the LLM team, I was also helping out with an International School Project conference for teachers and principals. So I was already a little worn out when Ice and Spice started! But I got energized when my friends arrived from Texas. It was a great week, filled with a lot of good conversations with high school students. And as the Albanian team followed up with the students after my friends left, we heard several times about students who received christ!

It's Summertime!

Sat, 25 Jun 2016 14:33:26 +0200

What time is it? It’s summertime!

It’s about time for Ice and Spice, the annual summer camp for high school students here in Tirana! My friends and I have been helping with this camp since the first time I came to Tirana, way back in 2013. A lot has changed since then! Albania Fried Chicken went out of business, but there’s now a legit KFC at the mall (Albania has only one mall).

Refreshed and Ready

Sat, 11 Jun 2016 11:49:34 +0300

It’s always great to go home. I’ve had multiple definitions of “home” over the years, but right now the place I most identify as “home” is Dallas. Having just spent 5 weeks there, I can totally confirm that is still the case.

Since I’ve committed to a second year here, I felt the need to go home and ask my supporters to commit to a second year with me. This was the perfect time to do it, since my cousin was getting married on June 4. The only other opportunity I might have would be in August, and who really wants to go to Dallas in August?

My Happy Place

Sun, 22 May 2016 11:59:12 -0600

This is my happy place

Lake Lyndon B. Johnson, about 45 minutes west of Austin. A beautiful constant-level freshwater lake. My grandmother has owned a lakehouse here for more than 30 years. My family and I vacationed here almost every summer. If there were no Good News to preach, I would as much as possible spend my time here.

Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.

6 Months and Counting

Wed, 20 Apr 2016 17:15:47 +0200

We’re moving into the spring now, and as I’m preparing to go back to Dallas for a 1 month fundraising trip, I thought I’d reflect on where we are after 6 months.

Towards the Goal

We have a growing number of contacts now, young professional believers who have been joining us for seminars and other activities. We’ve had a couple of vision casting meetings with them too. Word is beginning to get around that this is a place to continue what they were doing with student ministries. Most of our volunteers were formerly part of Jete Studentore (CRU’s campus ministry), which is a very good thing.

Shift musical

Thu, 24 Mar 2016 17:56:00 +0200

We got to see a really cool musical event this week! A big group of high school students from Colorado came to perform their evangelistic musical, “SHIFT”.

CRU’s high school and college ministries invited a lot of students from all around Tirana. I even saw the Elbasan kids show up. Our young professionals all went and sat together near the front. It was pretty awesome to see how many people showed up!

Sometimes It's Tough

Sat, 27 Feb 2016 14:35:52 +0100

I’ve posted a lot about the good times recently on this blog, but I thought with this post I’d let y’all in on the tough parts. Like any job it’s got ups and downs. Sometimes you work real hard for what seems like minimal gain. Sometimes you have all these cool plans and they get interrupted by something out of your control. Especially when your job is people.

This past week was tough for me. It started out good, I had a couple good coffees and we planned our social meeting on Wednesday. Tuesday evening we had a bible study, and that was enjoyable. I’m feeling some progress on Albanian, but it’s still tough to understand native speakers. Wednesday we had our social meeting, and we had a bunch of people come, but the two people I specifically invited did not come. So that was a bit disappointing.

Adventures in Dockerland

Sat, 20 Feb 2016 20:33:52 +0100

I’ve been on a serious docker/aws kick recently. I’ve learned just enough that it drives me to play with it. I spent a lot of my free time on it this week, and didn’t spend as much as I’d like on learning Albanian… This could be a problem…

Anyways I might as well post more about what I’ve learned. I’ve been wanting to make my web server more robust, to where if it dies for whatever reason I don’t have to do anything, it’ll come back on a new instance all on its own. Unfortunately that’s a bit more difficult than you’d expect. Lots of moving parts.

Docker Cloud is Neat

Mon, 15 Feb 2016 14:09:13 +0100

I had some time off today so I decided to revisit how I’m hosting all my stuff. One of my issues with using Amazon’s container service is that they make you assign resource values to each container, and those are not flexible. So, I have to give each container high enough memory that it won’t die, but then I run out of space on my server real quick. Since most of the stuff I want to host just sits idle the majority of the time, this wasn’t ideal for me.

Exploring and Networking

Sat, 30 Jan 2016 22:02:22 +0100

This past week I went to the STINT Mid-Year conference in Málaga, Spain. It was a lot of fun to hang out with a bunch of Americans! I didn’t know anyone when I got there, but by the end I had made several friends. The beachfront was beautiful, especially the late sunrise over the Mediterranean. I was excited to play a bunch of Ultimate Frisbee, since I hadn’t played for several months.

Hosting Reclaimed

Tue, 19 Jan 2016 21:31:01 +0100

Here’s another technical post for y’all!

I had some time this past weekend, so I took a look into the website I made a year ago for Reclaimed. The old version was made with Locomotive CMS, and hosted on Locomotive hosting. It was a good choice at the time, because we needed something fast. We wanted to deploy it before the 2015 super bowl.

I’d previously looked into moving it to Wordpress or Drupal, but that would basically require redoing the whole site. More work than I’m willing to put in. But, just this past weekend, Locomotive v3 came out. I decided to try hosting it myself, because $20/mo is just a bit too much to be paying for a simple website like this. Plus, it would be fun! (or so I thought.)

The first 3 months

Sun, 13 Dec 2015 13:49:46 +0100

I want to spend some time in this blog post unpacking what I’ve felt, what I’ve learned, and what I’ve found here in the past almost 3 months since I came to Albania. I really can’t believe time has gone by so fast. There’s so much to do, and so many new friends that it’s never boring. Is this what I want to do with the rest of my life? I can’t answer that yet. But I have met so many people here who have devoted their lives to missions. Is it worth it to do so? They would answer unequivocally yes.

Welcome Weekend

Mon, 07 Dec 2015 20:31:24 +0100

What a great weekend!

This weekend we had some visitors from Dallas. Rick Howard, the missions pastor for Watermark, and Cheryl Boyd came to visit. It was great to see them, to be encouraged by some friends from home. I’ve been looking forward to this for a while!

Cheryl has been in Eastern Europe with CRU for 12+ years, and so she knew a lot of CRU staff here in Albania. She and Alma Elliot are great friends, and were super excited to see eachother. In all those years somehow she never made it to Albania, so this was a great chance for her to catch up with some of her old friends.

Remaining Humble

Thu, 12 Nov 2015 10:31:35 +0100

This week we had our first young-professionals meeting! We had 17 people come to hear Dennis Beck speak on worldview. He did a great job telling stories which got the participants to think. He has a talent for conveying these high concepts in story form. The discussion went well also. I sat at a table with a few young professionals. Two of them are believers from Fabi’s church. The other was Dejvis, with whom I’ve been building a relationship. He’s the manager of the Cinnabon franchise next to the American embassy. He really enjoys coming to our seminars when he’s not working, and often brings friends.

Slow Going

Sat, 17 Oct 2015 14:35:49 +0200

I’ve been in Albania now almost 3 weeks. Prior to now, the longest I’d ever been outside the US was 10 days. It definitely feels strange, knowing I’ll be here probably 6 or 7 more months before I make a trip back to Dallas. There’s a lot of things I’ve been missing - including having a clothes dryer and a dishwasher. I saw some pictures of friends going to the State Fair, and I felt a bit homesick.

Running with Docker

Wed, 07 Oct 2015 20:33:41 +0200

Locked out!

I managed to lock myself out of my EC2 instance when I was managing my keys. So in order to update my blog, I had to deploy it to a new EC2 instance. I decided to take the opportunity to improve the way I’m deploying new versions of my site.

Note: This will be a technical post. If you’re following along with my adventure in Albania, you can skip this one.

Day 1 in Albania

Mon, 28 Sep 2015 15:15:11 +0100

I’m here!

It’s just as I remember it. All the buildings, streets, people. It almost feels like a 2nd home. I arrived at 2:30pm, and was picked up by my team leader Illir Stavro. He dropped me off at my apartment, which I’m sharing with two new members of the high-school ministry team: Gedis and Pal. It’s a nice, small apartment. I have my own room, and there’s a living area with a couch and a small bathroom and kitchen. It’s different from what I’m used to but not too different.

Fully funded!

Wed, 05 Aug 2015 20:40:27 -0500

Thanks to a good friend hosting an event last weekend, I have now reached my monthly goal! And I have some room to spare! I’m really thankful for everyone who’s contributed to help me. I’m excited to finalize my plans to begin this journey!

Speaking of which, I bought my plane tickets today! First time I’ve ever bought a one-way flight. But it’s locked in now. I fly from Dallas to Washington D.C. on September 23, and I’ll fly from DC to Tirana on Sunday the 27th.

Almost time

Thu, 18 Jun 2015 21:38:47 -0500

In less than 2 weeks, I’ll be in Albania :) This time just for 2 weeks, but I’m ready to go for good. But, all things in their time:

There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.
Ecclesiastes 3:1

Migrating to Node

Fri, 10 Apr 2015 23:23:19 -0500

My experience migrating my blog to nodejs

what is love?

Mon, 30 Mar 2015 23:14:36 -0500

What is love? Is it just not hurting me, as the song goes?

The scripture has a different definition of love.

“This is My commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends. You are My friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you. You did not choose Me but I chose you, and appointed you that you would go and bear fruit, and that your fruit would remain, so that whatever you ask of the Father in My name He may give to you. This I command you, that you love one another.
John 15:12-17

which which?

Tue, 06 Jan 2015 22:49:08 +0100

I’m using locomotivecms for a project I’m working on, and it uses ImageMagick for resizing pictures on the fly. The standard instructions say to use the bitnami Ruby stack installer to get everything you need in a nice neat bundle.

That worked for me for a while, until I needed to update the version of ruby I’m using. So, I went through the long and painful process of uninstalling the ruby stack, installing each component individually, identifying and correcting a ton of minor problems, and finally squashed the last bug by writing this program.

Euro Trip!

Mon, 05 Jan 2015 10:20:47 -0600

The best part is it’s only half over! I’m writing this post from the home of my good friend Aldo Rustemi, in Tirana the capital city of Albania. So much has happened, and so much more is to come. It’s awesome :)

Wien, Österreich

We began the trip in Vienna, where we went sightseeing just the three of us (me, Lucy and Chris). Vienna in the winter is amazing, especially when there’s snow on the ground.

The Realness of God

Tue, 16 Dec 2014 22:20:34 -0600

My friends and I were discussing christian music last night. The main line of discussion was the lack of realness & relevance of most christian songs. Most of them end up a bit like this:

When we turn worship leaders into recording artists, we get worship songs. Worship songs are great for “worship” (i.e. that thing we do on Sunday mornings), but the problem is that in reality, everything is supposed to be worship.

hosting the blog

Sun, 14 Dec 2014 18:42:21 -0600

I decided to use Amazon EC2 to host the blog, because they give you 1 year free on a micro instance. Plus I’ve always wanted to learn how to host something on Amazon’s cloud. I’ll get a linux instance and put an Apache HTTP server on it. Should be easy enough to do.

Here’s my EC2 management console after signing up for an Amazon account and creating a linux micro instance: ![EC2 Management console](/images/2014/EC2 management console.png)

Creating a blog

Sun, 14 Dec 2014 13:52:12 -0600

Well, here it is.

I’ve been wanting to create a blog for a while. I don’t know what it will look like in the future, or how often I’ll update it, but as I sit here writing it it’s kind of cathartic. It would be good to get some thoughts out there, and if anybody reads it that’s a bonus.

I want to talk about anything and everything on this blog. I’ll delve into my work, hopefully some of these pages will be useful when another developer types some obscure error code into google. I’ll discuss my faith, hopefully that could spark some interesting discussion. I’ll discuss the important stuff that happens in my life, hopefully someone might find it interesting.