I once spent a week troubleshooting a pair of routers that were part of a NASA Mars mission. They were using firmware over a decade old at the time, which was c

I once spent a week troubleshooting a pair of routers that were part of a NASA Mars mission. They were using firmware over a decade old at the time, which was causing issues with the internet facing edge devices, which had automatically updated a few weeks prior, and that started causing massive packet loss. There were redundant paths with redundant hardware, and the node I worked on wasn't particularly important, but I got a taste of what the engineers and scientists at NASA must live for, the sense of contributing to something historic, profound, and deeply human. The fix was simple at the end, a firmware rollback and disabling further updates, and most of the time was consumed in conversation and carefully assessing each step and action, but I count it as a high point in my career. Just to touch the edge of it was special. The people whose code and engineering get sent to space are contributing to the betterment of mankind, literally making the universe a better place. Kudos to those guys. To write code that's part of a critical system is a meaningful in a way