Attractive things work better
This reading talked about how people tend to ignore some usability flaws if the design of the object is visually appealing. I found this very interesting as I have never though of design to be such a powerful tool. And the craziest part about this reading was that it made me realize we all do it without thinking about it. For example, me personally, and I believe many of people reading this tend to grab an article which packaging looks better when buying stuff. For some reason, better looking packaging and elegant design is either associated with good quality or we just tend to look past quality flaws because of the nice design. This opened my eyes on the world of design and made me realize its importance, in the future I will try to give more importance to good design into my projects.
Her code got humans on the moon
Reading about Margaret Hamilton’s contributions to the Apollo missions really opened my eyes to how fundamental her work was, not just for the success of the Moon landing, but for the very concept of software engineering as we know it today. I had heard her name before, but I didn’t realize the extent of her leadership or how groundbreaking her work was in an era when software development wasn’t even taken seriously as an engineering field. What especially struck me was how she was thinking ahead, not just about what the computer should do, but about how humans might make mistakes and how the system should respond. When the exact scenario she predicted actually happened, it was her forward-thinking code that saved the mission. That moment really highlighted how her ideas were undervalued, not because they were wrong, but because of assumptions about who gets to be “right” in technical spaces.