margarethamilton.dev

A scroll-driven tribute to Margaret Hamilton (1936–2026), who led the Apollo 11 flight software and gave software engineering its name.

Visit the site → · Español · English

About

“There was no choice but to be pioneers. No time to be beginners.” — Margaret Hamilton

This site tells her story as one continuous scroll, from Paoli, Indiana, in 1936 to the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. Every chapter is a full-screen scene animated by the scroll: punch cards, a working DSKY, the tower of printed listings, the 1202 alarm, hand-woven rope memory and the real Apollo 11 source code.

Scenes

#	Scene	What happens
1	Opening	Stars over the Earthrise fly into place and become the letters of her quote.
2	Milestones	Her early years (Earlham, Edward Lorenz, SAGE, Apollo) punched as real Hollerith code on 80-column cards, like the ones used at MIT.
3	Lauren	A working DSKY replays the story of her daughter crashing the simulator with P01, the mistake Jim Lovell repeated on Apollo 8, and the birth of defensive programming.
4	The tower	The famous 1969 photo next to the listings, stacked binder by binder with real Luminary 099 and Comanche 055 module names.
5	The 1202 alarm	The Apollo 11 descent: the program alarms on the DSKY, “We’re Go on that alarm” and “The Eagle has landed.”
6	Rope memory	A wire threads through magnetic cores to spell 1202 in binary: software that was literally woven by hand.
7	The code	Real excerpts from Luminary 099 (BURN_BABY_BURN, PINBALL_GAME_BUTTONS_AND_LIGHTS, “PLEASE CRANK THE SILLY THING AROUND”) linked to their exact lines on GitHub, ending with her signature in the README.
8	Software engineering	The two words wobble like the joke they once were, then straighten and gain weight as you scroll, until they name a profession.
9	Legacy	Higher Order Software, Hamilton Technologies, the NASA Exceptional Space Act Award and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
10	Closing	“Thank you, Margaret.”

Screenshots

Milestones on 80-column punch cards	A working DSKY and the P01 incident
MIT, 1969: the tower of listings	“Program alarm.”
Rope memory spelling 1202	The real Apollo 11 source code
“Software engineering”, once a joke	Thank you, Margaret.

Under the hood

• Astro with zero UI frameworks. The site is fully static: Astro components, scoped CSS and a few small TypeScript modules.
• Scroll-driven scenes. Each [data-scene] is a tall container with a sticky stage. src/scripts/scroll.ts computes its progress (0 → 1) and exposes it as the --p custom property, so most animations are plain CSS. Texts appear at their moment through data-beat, and the page theme and year indicator follow the active scene.
• Stars that become letters. src/scripts/stars.ts scatters candidate stars across the sky of the photo and pairs each glyph with a star using an optimal assignment, so the trajectories never cross.
• A DSKY in HTML and CSS. Dsky.astro and src/scripts/dsky.ts recreate the Apollo Guidance Computer display and keyboard, with segmented electroluminescent digits.
• The real source code. src/data/listing.ts holds verbatim fragments of Luminary 099, the lunar module software, with their original line numbers. The GitHub star count of chrislgarry/Apollo-11 is fetched at build time.
• Bilingual. Spanish (default, /) and English (/en/) with Astro’s i18n routing and a tiny t({ es, en }) helper. The first visit follows the browser language and the choice is remembered.
• Typography with a story. Jost, a revival of Futura, the typeface on the plaque Apollo 11 left on the Moon, paired with IBM Plex Mono. Both are self-hosted through the Astro Fonts API.
• Details. Responsive images optimized with astro:assets, prefers-reduced-motion support, descriptive alt texts, Open Graph image, JSON-LD, hreflang alternates and a sitemap.

Project structure

/
├── public/                 # favicon, Open Graph image, robots.txt, sitemap.xml
└── src/
    ├── assets/             # photos and stickers, optimized at build time
    ├── components/
    │   ├── scenes/         # one component per chapter of the story
    │   ├── Dsky.astro      # Apollo Guidance Computer display and keyboard
    │   ├── Home.astro      # composes all the scenes
    │   ├── StarText.astro  # text whose letters are born from stars
    │   └── Starfield.astro
    ├── data/listing.ts     # real fragments of the Luminary 099 source code
    ├── layouts/Layout.astro
    ├── pages/              # / (Spanish) and /en/ (English)
    ├── scripts/            # scroll engine, starfield and DSKY logic
    └── i18n.ts

Getting started

Requirements: Node.js >=22.12.0 and pnpm.

git clone https://github.com/midudev/margarethamilton.dev.git
cd margarethamilton.dev
pnpm install
pnpm dev

Command	Action
pnpm dev	Start the dev server at localhost:4321
pnpm build	Build the production site to ./dist/
pnpm preview	Preview the production build locally

Credits

• Photos. NASA (Apollo 11, command module simulator, 1989 portrait). Draper Laboratory, 1969, restored by Adam Cuerden. The White House, 2016. Rope memory: Wikimedia Commons. All public domain. LEGO figure: Maia Weinstock, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. 1995 portrait: Daphne Weld Nichols, CC BY-SA 3.0, converted to black and white.
• Code. Luminary 099, transcribed by the Virtual AGC project from the MIT Museum listings, at github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11.
• Sources. MIT News and the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal.

License

The source code is released under the MIT License. Photos and other third-party media keep their original licenses, listed in Credits, and are not covered by it.

_{Thank you, Margaret.}