Kristin Everham

Let's talk a little more about Margaret Hamilton because she deserves it In 1961, Margaret Hamilton was tackling massive systems, having previously wrangled room-sized computers that blared like a foghorn whenever they crashed. Her fix wasn’t just to patch the bug. Everytime there was a crash, she took a Polaroid of the programmer who wrote it, and a note on the mistake. That way, if it ever happened again, they wouldn't be starting from scratch. They could note patterns and the last person who triaged that failure could help. This is a critical aspect of what she gave us. She didn’t stop at fixing errors. She studied their patterns so she could see them coming. She called them “the enemy,” and she meant it. Initially, when she was working on failure modes, higher-ups were errors wouldn't happen she actually named her program “Forget It.” But failures did happen. And her mindset, and discipline sent men to the Moon. Her Apollo software was built to expect the unexpected, and on Apollo 11 it recognized an overload mid-landing and kept the critical tasks running. Every postmortem, every bug tracker, every “let’s make sure this never happens again” carries a little of her in it. Thank you, and rest in peace, Margaret Hamilton 🚀