History

I’m a big fan of Chelsea Troy. I watched a great presentation by her on O’Reilly the other day called Product Thinking for Engineers(need a subscription). The presentation was a bit different than I had anticipated. I was thinking it was going to be fairly tacitcal stuff about how to work within a product team as an sofware engineer, and there was that, but it was so much more. To me, the most interesting part was a wide ranging and insightful discussion about how we got to where we are with the current oligopolistic state of play in Big Internet.

I really enjoyed this article in Men’s Journal about a ride by Erick Cedeño to retrace a route ridden by 20 Black soldiers in 1897. I didn’t know that the U.S. Army had ever experimented with a bicycle troop, but apparently they did and assigned a very tough task to some soldiers stationed at Fort Missoula, MT. Mr. Cedeño’s ride sounds very difficult but nothing compared to what those soldiers must have experienced.