Chris still loves fieldwork, and believes that most useful geological research requires some ground-truthing. However, field data isn’t perfect. It’s usually incomplete in time and space, with gaps that could be filled in a number of ways. More often than not, you are not directly measuring the thing you want to measure, which can mean that there’s more than one possible interpretation of your data. When simple models break down, and simply fitting a best-fit line through a scatter plot no longer cuts it, more complex simulations and models are required to try and find an interpretation that best explains what you are seeing. This is where knowing how to write your own computer code comes in. In the last few years, Chris has discovered that knowing how to speak computer is a valuable part of his research toolkit. Having played with Perl, R, Fortran and particularly Python, he now knows more computer languages than human ones (if you exclude the dead ones, at least). In this era of ‘Big Data’, he thinks it’s going to be an increasingly important part of every scientist’s workflow in the years to come. Even Anne (grudgingly) agrees!