Jokes in MATLAB: Learn about contributing to a MATLAB toolbox

Posted by Mike Croucher, October 15, 2025

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Mike's pick this week is Jokes in MATLAB by Gareth Thomas

The Jokes in MATLAB toolbox provides you with a joke() function

joke()

Why did the software engineer stay cool under pressure? Because he had excellent exception handling.

You can also ask for a joke in a range of languages

joke(language="portuguese")

Porque é que o ficheiro .zip foi de férias?Para descomprimir.

There's also a simple app which you can find by clicking on Apps -> My Apps -> jokeApp inside MATLAB

Learning about MATLAB development through jokes

Although this is fun, the main reason why I like Jokes in MATLAB is that it was designed as an exercise in how to develop and deliver a MATLAB toolbox. As Gareth describes in this LinkedIn post, he was able to start from scratch to having a toolbox on File Exchange and available from the MATLAB Add-ons Panel in around 90 minutes. There were some lessons for us, MathWorks, as well as for you, the developer of a new toolbox. Some of these lessons included:-

MathWorks publishes MATLAB Toolbox Best Practice guidelines
MATLAB GitHub actions make life easy
You can easily connect a GitHub repo to File Exchange so that updates to a GitHub get automatically published to File Exchange.
badges allow users to interact with your toolbox via MATLAB Online -- even when they don't have a MATLAB license!

Pull Requests are welcome

If you have ever wanted to contribute to an open source project but aren't sure where to start, this toolbox might be the answer. Gareth encourages both the creation of GitHub Issues and Pull Requests. You can do both of these on the project's GitHub repository.