Well, that photo of Margaret Hamilton standing next to a pile of papers taller than she is has always amazed me as a kid. I remember seeing it everywhere online when I was younger; it circulated a lot in the Arab world, on Facebook and Tumblr especially. People shared it with captions about how her code took humans to the moon. Even before I knew who she was, I could feel that the image meant something special–this one person beside a literal mountain of her own work.
After reading Her Code Got Humans on the Moon, I finally understood why that picture had such an impact. Hamilton wasn’t just part of the Apollo program; she helped define what software engineering even was. Back in the 1960s, people didn’t really think of “software” as an important part of space missions; it wasn’t even included in NASA’s original budgets. But Hamilton and her team at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab changed that. They wrote the code that ran on the Apollo spacecraft, and their work made it possible for Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to land safely on the moon. What struck me most in the reading was how she handled the pressure. There’s a part where she talks about staying up late to fix a single line of code because she was afraid it could cause an error during a mission. And later, that actually happened—an error almost caused chaos during Apollo 11, but because of how Hamilton had designed the software to prioritize important tasks, the system recovered and saved the mission. That’s insane to think about; one person’s attention to detail made the difference between failure and success.
I also liked how the reading mentioned her bringing her daughter, Lauren, to the lab on weekends. It was such a human detail—this image of a mother working on code that would go to space while her kid slept next to her. People back then questioned her for it, asking how she could leave her daughter to work, but she just did what she believed in. That kind of dedication hit me.