Chris Hambleton's Blog, page 7
December 8, 2015
Life After Divorce: Part 1 of ??
Dating. For recently divorced people, it’s oftenthe proverbial elephant in the room. The subject of dating usually comes up right after the uncomfortable admissionof divorce is uttered. Along with deciding to stay put in Colorado until my youngest daughter graduates from high school, another decision I made awhile back is to not really date for at least a year,which 
hasn’t been easy at times!
While I’ve read (and agree with) that it’s always good to take some time off between relationships to...
No Dating Allowed
Dating. For recently divorced people, it’s oftenthe proverbial elephant in the room. The subject of dating usually comes up right after the uncomfortable admissionof divorce is uttered. Along with deciding to stay put in Colorado until my youngest daughter graduates from high school, another decision I made awhile back is to not date anyone for at least eighteen months, which hasn’t been easy at times!
While I’ve read (and agree with) that it’s always good to take some time off between relati...
November 23, 2015
Being Fleshed Out – Emergent Design
In ourlatest adventure at work, we’re racing headlong and headfirst down the road of “emergent design” in Agile software development. We’re learning how to “fail fast and fail often” the hard way, and it’s been a challenge to determine whether we’re failing “correctly” — if there really is such a thing!
Traditionally, software was developed insome form of “waterfall process” in which a relatively firm set ofrequirements were defined by sales or marketing, which then flowed down to engineering...
November 3, 2015
Becoming Unpolitical (and Happily So!)
Politics. It’s that other dirty little eight-letter word that never goes away. This day next year, we’ll be going to the polls and voting for the next president. The media will be falling all over themselves trying to predict — and possibly influence — the outcome. Meanwhile, politics in modern America really is just show-business for the ugly (as one radio-host frequently puts it).
As the nextelection season gets rolling, I’ve already had several people ask me who I’m favoring. Seriously? Th...
October 28, 2015
Life is Short… Walk with God
Ashley Madison — the scandal that just won’t go away. Though the Ashley Madison hack/scandal is already a few monthsold, the repercussions continue to be felt throughout the corporate and religious world. The most recent update is that Gawker has released the photos that Josh Duggar used in his profile. The hackers have evenpublished a site to allow anyone to search the database; evidently 30+ million users is rather tedious to digthrough.
The latest Christian leader to be affected is R.C. Sp...
October 17, 2015
Bootstrap and Psalm 42
Several of the current buzzwords in web developmenttodayare Bootstrap, mobile-first, and responsive design, along with Angular, Ruby, Jasmine, Karma, and many, many others! A hallmark of open-source projects and collaborative frameworks is to use goofy names that are usually common and easy to remember, such as “broccoli”, “cucumber”, and “apache” (which is completely unrelated to the Native American tribe).
In the new project we’re developing at work, we’re relying heavily on Bootstrap and s...
October 8, 2015
Iteration Retros – The Airing of Grievances
One of the better teampractices in software development is to hold retrospectives after every development cycle(iteration, sprint, release, etc.). Iteration retros give the team an opportunity to review the user-stories (requirements) that werecompleted and discuss ways of improving the next development cycle so the same mistakes aren’t repeated.
The usual format is to review the iteration and then have the team discuss what went right, what went wrong, and what we could do better. When itera...
October 1, 2015
Another Big Decision Made
This year has been full of big decisions. Really big decisions. Some I’ve had a direct say in, while other have been completely out of my control.
A coupleweeks ago, Imade the big decision to stay put here in Colorado, to not start a new life in another place. It wasn’t an easy decision for me to make, and I find myself still waffling a little bit about it from time to time, but I know I really don’t have much of a choice — at least not at this time.
To make a long story short, I had beeninte...
September 28, 2015
Being Thankful for Unanswered Prayers??
Something that’s been on my mind quite a bit lately is the matter of unanswered prayers. Most of us spend so much time and energy onhow badlywe wantourprayers to be answered that we don’t think about all those prayers He chooses to leave“unanswered” —which are all-too-often forgotten over the course of our lives.
I suppose it all began a few weeks ago when I stumbled upon a couplesongs that my old roommate in college used to play in our apartment. Much of it was the 70’s/80’s rock music like...
September 21, 2015
My God, It’s Full of Stars!
One of the most memorable movie lines from my childhood that I’ll never forget is:“My God, it’s full of stars!” These wereDave Bowman’s final
words as he entered the monolith in the movie“2001: A Space Odyssey”; what made them especially memorable is probably because most of the movie was silent. The other movie line that’s permanently stuck in my head is: “1.21 gigawatts!??!” from “Back to the Future”.
Icouldn’t help but have that same reaction when Isaw the crystal-clear night sky from the...
