Question: what small codes do you write? what do they do?

James Boone answered on 16 Mar 2012:

Good question! My small codes are written in a computer language called Fortran and a lot of the time what they do is open a file, read in coordinates of atom positions, apply some mathematical equations and then write the new coordinates out to a file. My favourite little code that I wrote is one that turns a flat sheet of graphene into a fold shape like a letter S with long ends. It was nice to get that working! 🙂

I would encourage anyone to learn a computer language, even if it’s jjust the basics. The most useful one right now is called C++ and it’s so powerful! It’s likely that a lot of the apps on your smartphone are written in this langauge.