Margaret Hamilton, lead software engineer, Project Apollo
▻https://medium.com/@3fingeredfox/margaret-hamilton-lead-software-engineer-project-apollo-158754170da8
The bias that “women do the mere programming” extended into the early days of the computer, and it meant that many of the earliest and most pioneering programmers were women, learning hands-on to do things that had never been done before. (...)
Margaret Hamilton earned her BA in math from Earlham College, but obviously learned about programming on the job—there was no other way. In the photo above, she is standing in front of the printouts of the code for the Apollo guidance system, a lot of which she wrote and which she oversaw.
She was all of 31 when the Apollo 11 lunar module landed on the moon, running her code. (Apollo 11 was able to land at all only because she designed the software robustly enough to handle buffer overflows and cycle-stealing.)
She’s now a tech CEO and won the ‘86 Lovelace Award and the NASA Exceptional Space Act Award.
▻http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_%28scientist%29
