Programming was actually what I did best. I had been programming since I was eleven and also took some computer science courses at the university. In addition,

Programming was actually what I did best. I had been programming since I was eleven and also took some computer science courses at the university. In addition, the kind of programming that most physicists do isn’t really helped by the skill many so called engineers have. It’s not about organising large multitude of systems and their interaction (which is usually the hard parts today) as much as knowing things about efficient numerical packages and making sure that the computer’s finite precision don’t overwhelm your statistical uncertainties. And of course, to understand the model, with its limitations, of the system we are trying to simulate and efficient algorithms for that.