CodeHer #2: Margaret Hamilton
The CodeHer Whose Code Got Humans to the Moon
At Codeworks Bootcamp Barcelona, we’re calling them CodeHers. Female computer scientists, techies, developers and programmers.
Join us for this five-part series, shining a light on famous CodeHers throughout history, alongside Codeworks students past and present. It’s a small step in a continuing fight against the huge gender gap in the industry.
Discount for Women
Another step we’ve taken is our discount: we offer 10% off course fees for women at our Barcelona Bootcamp. Until we’re teaching both male and female students, in a healthy 50/50 split, we have work to do, positively discriminating towards female applicants.
First let’s learn from our predecessors. Let’s jump back to a decade before Microsoft. The 1960s. Here, we’ll discover the acclaimed spaceship programmer: Margaret Hamilton.
In the early days of programming, computers read cards with holes punched in them as input. Punching holes into cards was seen as similar to typing. That explains why it was considered a woman’s job, as most typists of the time were women.
Get Your Priorities Straight
Margaret cranked it up a notch. She helped shape modern software development to what we teach at Codeworks today. Her work helped enable the computer to figure out which of the multiple processes it had to do, was more important:
“It got rid of the lesser priority jobs and kept the higher priority jobs, which included the landing functions,” she explains.
Better still, without Hamilton’s software, Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s landing on the moon wouldn’t have been possible.
Cool CodeHer facts
- Hamilton created the term ‘Software Engineer’
- She led a team that developed the software for the in-flight command of the Apollo missions
- She wrote software for a program to identify enemy aircraft
- Barack Obama awarded her with the medal of freedom. More winners included Bill and Melinda Gates, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Bruce Springsteen, part of a group President Obama hailed as “extraordinary Americans who have lifted our spirits, strengthened our union, pushed us toward progress.”
‘’When I first got into it, nobody knew what it was that we were doing. It was like the Wild West. ‘’
Why She’s a Maverick
She used banter to survive.
Until the 70s, ‘computer’ was a NASA job title. It referred to mathematicians who plotted data for aviation and space research. Most of these jobs were held by women. However in Hamilton’s field at MIT, most of the jobs were held by men. She loved the novelty of being the odd one out, and thrived on the banter and geeky in-jokes. She joked with men and women; when it came to office camaraderie, she gave as good as she got.
She fought to balance work and personal life.
A working mother in the 1960s was not the norm. Especially one bringing her daughter to work during weekends and evenings. In this way, Hamilton was able to spend as much time as possible with her daughter and work at MIT. “People used to say to me, ‘How can you leave your daughter? How can you do this?’’, she remembers. While 4-year-old Lauren slept on the floor of the office, her mother programmed away.
She fought for her discipline
As she explains: “I fought to bring the software legitimacy, so that it — and those building it — would be given its due respect and thus I began to use the term ‘software engineering’ to distinguish it from hardware and other kinds of engineering”. Software engineering eventually gained the same respect as any other discipline.
What Can We Learn From Margaret?
1. Find ways not to repeat mistakes
‘‘When an error would happen, you’d find a way for it not to happen again’’, Hamilton remembers. Once, after a late-night party, she rushed back to the computer lab to correct a piece of code she’d suddenly realized was flawed:
“I was always imagining headlines in the newspapers, and they would point back to how it happened, and it would point back to me.”
2. You can make it up as you go along, (in a good way!)
She says: ‘‘Looking back, we were the luckiest people in the world. There was no choice but to be pioneers; no time to be beginners. When answers could not be found, we had to invent them.’’
3. It’s okay to change your mind.
Graduating in mathematics, Hamilton was planning to go on and study abstract maths. However, instead she accepted a job at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). At MIT, she got involved in all sorts of different projects, keeping her career options open. Then, something big happened: NASA asked MIT to develop the navigation system for the Apollo spacecraft in the 1960s.
Hamilton got in there and joined the team involved. In 1965 she became responsible for the onboard software on the Apollo computers. After a few years of work, she spearheaded a team that met the challenge set by NASA: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. The rest is history. Software engineering, a concept Hamilton pioneered, has found its way from the moon landing to nearly every human task. From ordering an Uber, to existentialist apps that remind us we’re going to die (yes that app exists!) , there is no way we could live without software.
Had Margaret stuck with maths, the world would be missing a life-changing CodeHer.
Next up:
For the next instalment in our CodeHers series, discover GraceHopper CodeHer#3, the woman who was turned down from the Navy, but ended up coining the phrase ‘de-bugging.’
