Sarah Betts

So that was pretty neat, but also fiddly & irritating because there were no docs on anything. Summer ended & I went back to my structural engineering classes. Then a few months later the professor who ran the lab forwarded me an email she’d gotten from a colleague in Brazil.

This was the mid-90s, & environmental scientists in Brazil were battling with their government over rainforest deforestation. Loggers were clear-cutting immense columns of rainforest, but in locations so remote that the government was able to deny it was happening at all.

This scientist who wrote to us had used our web page (despite the bugs) to find two photos of the same location in the remote Brazilian rainforest, taken 10 years apart.

The earlier photo was pretty, but unremarkable. The later one, though, showed clear, long scars, like claw marks through the forest, where loggers had clear-cut. So big that they were visible from space.

This scientist had used these two photos - official US government photos, so difficult to dismiss as fakes - to help convince some of the ministers in the government that clear-cutting was actually happening - despite the logging industry’s assurances to the contrary.

That was what hooked me on software - this idea that surfacing information to a wider audience could change the world. I switched majors to computer science and haven’t looked back.

There’s that phrase - “change the world.” That’s how I thought about it at the time.