Margaret Hamilton, lead software engineer, Project Apollo
Besides the great photo and backstory, I liked this snippet:<p>> <i>She was all of 31 when the Apollo 11 lunar module landed on the moon, running her code. (Apollo 11 was able to land at all only because she designed the software robustly enough to handle buffer overflows and cycle-stealing.)</i><p>You could read that paragraph in several ways. Back then, accomplishing something like that at 31 seems precocious. Today, in the hype about 18-year-olds becoming millionare-startup founders, she sounds like a late bloomer of a programmer.