Good Morning, It’s your captain speaking. Welcome aboard the Developer’s Commute. Today we have a story of a developer who took Apollo 11 to the moon and is responsible for stopping the abortion of the mission, some interesting tweets, articles, motivation and in the end, Coding Motivation to keep you moving We hope that you enjoy this ride with us and you have a pleasant journey ahead.

Developer Stories

Developer who took Apollo 11 to the moon

We have heard the great stories of startup founders building a company from a small garage to big tech Silicon Valley. It is inspiring to see them grow from nothing to a billion-dollar company.

It indeed takes a lot of skill and grit to build a good company that will outlast decades. But, we get too occupied by the success of individuals and forget the people who helped the founder build his company. The engineers who were working day and night to solve the hardest problems. Trying to provide value to the customers and make amazing software.

I want to tell the story of one such developer. A software engineer who made the moon landing possible. You must have guessed her name by now. It is Margaret Elaine Hamilton, a computer scientist from MIT who is responsible for the successful Apollo Moon landing. When the moon landing was about to be aborted, her code was responsible for making it successful. She even coined the term “Software Engineering” when computer science was in its infant stage.

Of course, there is a lot to her story but I want to iterate a small part of her life. I want to tell the story of saving Apollo 11 and the moon landing.

It all started when Hamilton found an error that could lead to overriding the navigation data of the Apollo computer. It could be caused due to entering a wrong set of codes. If the pilot entered a code that should not have been entered at that time, it might lead to errors. To avoid such human errors, she thought of making a fail-safe program that would prevent this type of error. But, she was told by her seniors that this program might not be necessary as astronauts are highly trained.

During Apollo 8 the error did happen when the Astronaut Jim Lovell entered the wrong code. This error led to overriding the navigation data. It could have been a disaster but Hamilton and her team found the problem and a way to upload the navigation data into the system.

To make Apollo 11 successful, she was given the authority to write the fail-safe code that would prevent such human errors. She successfully wrote the code and integrated it into Apollo 11.

But, during the flight of Apollo 11, another problem was raised which would have led to the abortion of the whole mission. During the landing of Eagle, it sent out some warning signals that told the scientist that the system did not have enough processing power to compute a successful landing. The Eagle was to use 90 per cent of its processing power for landing itself safely and the rest to maintain the essential gears onboard. But, due to some errors, it did not have enough power to land safely.

It was Hamilton’s priority display that saved the landing. The priority display tells the astronaut when any type of error arises. During the landing, the Astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were able to spot the error in time and send the error code back to the control centre on earth. The control centre was able to identify the problem and give a go-ahead signal to the astronauts.

During the time astronauts were on the surface of the moon, the Hamilton team was trying to figure out the solution to the problem. It was discovered that the rendezvous radar was taking a lot of processing power from the Eagle. Therefore they ordered the Astronauts to cut the power supply to radar. Thanks to Hamilton and her team, the Eagle had enough power to reach the Earth safely.

This was a small story of Margaret Elaine Hamilton, I hope you enjoyed this newsletter.

I would want a movie on her like Oppenheimer. What do you think?

If I have written something wrong, Please forgive me. Thank you for reading.

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Developer Motivation

Goodbye Fellow Developer

I hope you enjoyed this Developer’s Commute. Thank you for joining me.

Your Captain- Hitesh Kohli