One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind
While the Apollo 11 mission is celebrated for the historic achievement of landing the first humans on the Moon, the success of this mission was also greatly enabled by the tireless efforts of a pioneering computer scientist - Margaret Hamilton. As the lead software engineer responsible for developing the onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo missions, including Apollo 11.
On the left, you can see Margaret Hamilton next to the printout of the source code of the Apollo flight software, together with its documentation. If we are generous to Ms. Hamilton, the stack of papers is about 2 meters high.
Nowadays, all of us browse the web, and the lines of code for Chromium and your favorite operating system amount to about 100 million lines of code. If we imagine printing this code, we would get a stack of 370 meters (assuming 27 lines per page and a thickness of 0.1mm per page).
While 2 meters of complexity landed humanity on the Moon in 1969, today we need 370 meters of complexity to surf the web.
The growth in software complexity is a testament to the incredible advancements in technology, but it also highlights the challenges faced by developers and security researchers in navigating and understanding these vast codebases.
As software systems evolve, their codebase expands exponentially, making it increasingly difficult to maintain a comprehensive understanding of their inner workings. Below visualization offers a unique perspective, tracking the growth of different projects over time. By leveraging Git history, we can visualize the steady accumulation of code, highlighting the sheer scale of modern software development and the pressing need for effective testing strategies.