October 2026

There were 4 posts published in October 2026 (this is page 1 of 1).

The passing of MIT/NASA pioneer Margaret Hamilton

This week, it was announced that Margaret Hamilton had died. From the MIT News article announcing her death: “Hamilton worked first on the software for the uncrewed Apollo missions and then was promoted into leading the team developing the on-board flight software for the crewed missions. By 1968 she was assistant director in charge of the Command and Service Module team, and more than 400 people were working on Apollo’s software.”

Hamilton worked for the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which was a contractor working for NASA on the Apollo program. The team she lead was developing software for the Apollo Guidance Computer. This computer had 2K words of random-access memory (RAM) and 36K words of read-only memory (ROM). Even with those constraints, and limited processor capability, NASA was able to conduct the Apollo missions. Hamilton deserves a lot of credit, and stands on par with other women at NASA such as Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughn.

Thanks to Manton Reece and Sven Dahlstrand for posting on this event.

Podcast on design engineering in software development

I am 2/3 of the way listening to this podcast, and it is giving me some insight into the (visual) design of software. In my career in the aerospace industry, this was not a topic that was included in most of the software I worked on. Maggie Appleton talks about the importance of the human input in creating user interfaces, and how most, if not all, of agent software tools (Claude, Chat-GPT, etc.) have not been successful in producing good designs from prompt input. The part that I am finding most interesting is near the end, where she talks about a prototype app her team was creating. I found this more inspiring than her stories of iterating on user interfaces with Figma, etc.

Followup on support for Drummer oldSchool blogs

Recently, I mentioned that I worked with Claude Code to add scripts and changes to the drummerCms Github repo to be able to build a local copy of an oldSchool blog from a Drummer OPML file. In conversation with Frank McPherson, he asked if the web-based outliner from Dave Winer that I modified this year could support editing a OPML file for Drummer oldSchool blog use. This morning, I was able to add outline elements matching those in an oldSchool blog OPML file and was able to build a new local copy with those changes correctly rendered.

Based on this testing, I believe my OPML outliner can support oldSchool blogging use, with some inconveniences (having to add other outline elements used within oldSchool). If anyone is interested in collaborating on updating the outliner UI to support oldSchool blogging, let me know!