Margaret Hamilton Died at 90; Software Engineering Outlasted Apollo
Apollo's software lead died on September 30 at 90; the part of her credit that still shows up on an org chart is the discipline.
Margaret Hamilton died on September 30 at 90. She led an MIT software team for NASA’s Apollo program, and she helped establish software engineering as a discipline. Her two decades at MIT produced work across computer science and engineering. The missions are the part most people know; the discipline is the part still running.
Helping establish a discipline is an odd line for a death notice: disciplines are not events, and one person cannot finish one. Flight software for Apollo is the famous work, and it ended the way missions end. A discipline does not end that way; there is no splashdown for a standard. It has to be practiced again the next morning, by people who were never in the room, and that is the slower, less photogenic half of the credit.
I build and break software for a living, write software engineering on forms without thinking about it, and have never once had to argue that the job is engineering. That argument was made before I arrived, and I only ever saw the receipts: a title, a review cycle, a line on a hiring page. The title is settled; the practice is not.
Worth stopping for, and not only as a memorial. The mission gets the anniversaries; the discipline gets the job description. Notice how much of a normal workday runs on a title somebody had to fight to make normal — a job posting, a review cycle, a signature line, the word on a badge that stopped looking like an argument decades ago. Anyone who writes software for money should read the notice in full this week; it is short.