Computer systems, programing languages and digital platforms have changed beyond recognition even just in the last few years. It is now easy and free to start scientific computing, and these skills to operate computational tools are in high demand. Researching how we can adopt emerging industry-standard high performance computing technologies paradigms is not a side track but integral part of our work to build models and methods to interrogate Earth observations. Incorporating abstraction, the object-oriented programing paradigm and cloud-based workflows advances our scientific goals. We are proud to use and keep learning open-source software tools that all of us will have reliable access to for the rest of our careers.