The Self-Taught Computer Scientist

7Self-Taught Inspiration: Margaret Hamilton

All of my friends who have younger siblings who are going to college or high school—my number-one piece of advice is: you should learn how to program.

Mark Zuckerberg

Today, there are so many resources to teach yourself how to program; it is easy to forget it wasn't always that way. Margaret Hamilton, one of the original coders on the Apollo space mission and one of the greatest self-taught programmers of all time, made her mark on technology long before programming courses were widely available.

While Hamilton did go to college (she received a B.A. from the University of Michigan in mathematics), her programming skills were entirely self-taught. In the 1950s and '60s, everyone was self-taught because computer science as we know it did not exist yet, so programmers had to figure things out on their own. At the time, the word software engineering didn't even exist: Hamilton helped coin it! After she graduated from college in 1960, Hamilton began her programming career working at MIT on software called Project Whirlwind to predict the weather. While she was at MIT, she helped create the code for the world's first portable computer.

Hamilton's success with Project Whirlwind led to a position with SAGE, an organization that helped detect potential Soviet airstrikes during the Cold War. If you're a Star Trek fan, you'll know the story of the Kobayashi Maru—a training exercise for Starfleet cadets that was unwinnable. Future officers ...