Last week I happened to come across a summary I wrote after completing my first month at MathWorks. This was quite a while a go ... December 1993!

I was hired to take over development of the Image Processing Toolbox, which had just shipped version 1.0. From the summary, I see that I spent a lot of time that first month studying the toolbox, looking at the way product demos and GUIs were programmed (back then, anyway), and writing a new product demo (on quadtree decomposition).

A fair amount of time that first month was spent getting up and running on my computer, an HP workstation running some flavor of Unix. I read a few months worth of internal newsgroup postings in order to learn more about my new colleagues and company. I drafted a new section on JPEG image compression for a marketing document called MATLAB Expo, and I searched for a cool-looking sample image to use in an ad. I attended a meeting of the MathWorks Social Mission Team.

I studied specs for MATLAB 5.0, which we thought would ship soon but actually took three more years.

And I learned the company's bug tracking system in order to report my very first bug found.

Hey ... speaking of new jobs, we just completed our annual planning process, and in 2012 we plan to hire bunches of people at MathWorks!

So please, take a look at the Careers section of our web site to see if an opening interests you. And submit your resume now! Managers are going crazy trying to fill the openings.