Software engineering was recognized as its own type of engineering in the 1960s. At first, the tools and guidelines developed for it were mostly based on common sense, intuition, and personal experience, but not empirical evidence. It took until the late 1990s for researchers in the area to embrace empirical methods. This article is a personal story of how I experienced the maturing of Software Engineering research into an evidence-based science. I will interpret this development using two competing philosophical concepts, rationalism and empiricism, and describe how pragmatism reconciles them.