Margaret Hamilton, NASA's lead developer for the Apollo program, standing next to all the code she wrote by hand that took humanity to the moon in 1969.
@rogward and not at all brittle!😱
@edgeoforever @rogward Oh, it was super-brittle. You could restart the whole mission mid-coast to the moon and strand yourself with no navigational plan in space (which Apollo 8 did).
... but she and her team were on top of that too. Because reprogramming the capsule was extremely expensive, they identified bugs and then documented workaround plans. The Apollo 8 mission isn't remembered like Apollo 13 because mis-keying the restart sequence was immediately followed by executing the documented plan to restore computer state. She turned issues into non-issues.
@mtomczak @edgeoforever @rogward and I thought losing steps on a 3d printer was bad