A picture of Margaret Hamilton, programmer for the Apollo space program, standing next to not one single microsoft error message or bluetooth problem.

[lerxst@az.social]

@mhoye Yup, she's (not as) widely recognized (as I thought, apparently) as the founder of software engineering.

[sarajw@front-end.social]

@lerxst @mhoye mmhmmm. Amazing how the women got pushed out, I guess because it was seen as something that the clever men should do and be well paid for...

[sarajw@front-end.social]

@lerxst @mhoye the way I see it, it *should* be an ideal job for a parent (whether male, female, NB), with good opportunities to work async, part time, from home.

Sadly structural stuff, mandatory meetings, the so many "ritual" meetings make the async part-timeness more difficult.

[lerxst@az.social]

@sarajw @mhoye So many meetings could be literally two Slack or even IRC messages per person.

[janxdevil@sfba.social]

@sarajw @mhoye On that note, I recently learned about how the original group of ENIAC programmers were all women. One of them is credited with having invented the debugger breakpoint.

[ryanprior@mastodon.social]

@mhoye I read that she also coined the term "test harness"

[benjamingeer@piaille.fr]

@mhoye On the other hand, Michael Collins did have to turn something off and on again to fix a problem

[swiftone@mastodon.online]

@mhoye I use the first pic to teach the difference between the purpose of a caption and alt text, with a guerilla casual mention of how much we owe Hamilton and similar minimized women.

[hyc@mastodon.social]

@janxdevil @sarajw @mhoye yep. Kay McNulty was one of them, from just a bit up the road from my house. https://www.womensmuseumofireland.ie/exhibits/kay-mcnulty

[sarajw@front-end.social]

@spacehobo is it just going to make me more mad or give me something constructive to do about it?

Otherwise nowadays I can only cope with fiction, novels, I need the escapism...

@lerxst @mhoye

[hyc@mastodon.social]

@janxdevil @sarajw @mhoye they have a monument dedicated to her at her birthplace now. I like to visit it every year...