Welcome to The MATLAB Blog

Posted by Mike Croucher, May 3, 2022

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In the last post of her long running blog, ‘Loren on the Art of MATLAB‘, Loren Shure mentioned that I’d be continuing the MathWorks tradition of blogging about MATLAB. So here I am and here is the new, imaginatively titled ‘The MATLAB blog’. Just as Loren did, you can expect a bunch of blog posts from me as well as guest posts from a wide range of MathWorkers and MATLAB fans around the world.

Who am I? The blogger formerly known as WalkingRandomly.

I joined MathWorks at the beginning of 2021, right in the middle of the COVID pandemic, as a Customer Success Engineer which means that I work with academics to help them solve their problems and get the most out of MATLAB.

Over the previous 21 years my relationship with MathWorks has shifted several times. I was originally a student user which naturally led to me becoming a research user. A few years later I got into academic research computing support where MATLAB was one of my specialties alongside several other languages and systems. I started a blog called WalkingRandomly which covered MATLAB among several other technical computing topics.

Over a long career at several large universities in the UK I’ve had to deal with almost every aspect of life with MATLAB. I’ve written a lot of code of course but have also run license servers, installed MATLAB on High Performance Computing Clusters and handled deployment to thousands of desktop PCs around campus among other things.

I’ve been the leader of research software engineering groups that developed software written in MATLAB, Python, R, C++ and a plethora of other languages. I’ve worked in organisations that compete against MATLAB and I’ve worked with people where MATLAB and Simulink are the only tools they use.

Whatever the stage of the relationship, whether it be student, customer, fan, critic or competitor, one thing has remained constant: MathWorks are a great company to interact with. Every day, over 5000 MathWorks employees wake up with one aim in mind “To accelerate the pace of Engineering and Science” and it’s a joy to be among them.

What to expect from this blog

As you might expect from a blog called “The MATLAB blog”, there’s going to be a lot of MATLAB! We’ll dive into new (and old) functionality and look at how it can be applied to solve your problems. Not only will we spend time with MATLAB itself but we’ll also take a tour through the various toolboxes and other MathWorkers will be joining me along the way via guest blog posts for topics that are far beyond my ken.

MATLAB does not exist in a vacuum so I’ll also be discussing topics that, at first glance, might not seem to have a place on The ‘MATLAB’ blog. Python, C++, Excel, R, CUDA, TensorFlow and many more will also be making guest appearances here and there.

Finally, I want to talk about people and communities. The most important thing that I learned during the 10+ years that I was involved in The Research Software Engineering community is that the people behind the software we rely on, and the communities they are part of, are among the most important assets we have.

Over to you

As the newest MathWorks blogger on the block, I want…no…., I need to hear from all of you. What do you want to see in this new blog? Leave your comments here, or feel free to say hi to me on twitter.