This week's post is by Mike Croucher. Mike is a member of the Customer Success Engineering team in the UK, working with academics around the country on their teaching and computational research. Mike has been a supporter of the Research Software Engineering movement since its inception and co-founded one of the first RSE groups in the UK. You can find Mike on Twitter (Mike Croucher (@walkingrandomly) / Twitter) and LinkedIn (Mike Croucher | LinkedIn)

by Mike Croucher

Anyone who has worked around academia for a long time will tell you that there are many roles in academic research that are vital-but-unrecognised.  Software development used to be one of them!  Back in 2012, a group of people decided to change this situation and created what has since become the Research Software

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See this? This is so cool.

What you're looking at is the new Scratch Pad area for Cody. It will make playing Cody more efficient, less messy, and more pleasant all the way around. If you've never played Cody before, you should try it just to see this new feature in action. Here's how it works.

There are more than 4,300 problems on Cody. So how do you decide where to start? I use Groups to focus my energy on one particular set of themed problems. I love the glow of satisfaction I get when I complete a group (and win the accompanying badge).

Lately I've been working on Indexing IV, the aptly-named fourth in a series of groups focused on indexing problems. Here's one I was just looking at:

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Akrem Hadji is a top contributor to Cody.  Here is a Q&A I did with Akrem who is a Telecommunications Engineer in Tunisia.                  

I started using MATLAB in 2012, during my engineering studies. We used MATLAB in class for signal processing. I recall the first exercise was to make an array of “Dirac'' pulses. After that, every lesson was a new opportunity to explore more tools. My skill has improved with time. In the beginning I remember that the MATLAB language was very practical with an arsenal full of all the needed functions. By the end of the first year in

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The Live Editor combines code, output, and formatted text in a single executable notebook. Last year, we introduced this notebook-y (notebook-esque?) goodness in the MATLAB Mobile app on your iPhone or iPad. This post is a primer on what you can do with Live Scripts on your iOS device.

Before we dive in, a note to our Android users: do not despair, for the Live Editor will make its way to your devices in the near future!

On the iPad, MATLAB Mobile sports a three-panel design for you to customize your real estate. View your Live Script side-by-side with your file browser (or other tabs) and the command window. Or, if you prefer to only view your editor, that’s fine as well.

You can interact with your Live Scripts by navigating through the individual sections, evaluating them independently (by tapping on the left margin of the section to run) or all together to view the output or visualizations that your code

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What to do? It's nearly February 14th, and what, oh what will you get your sweet one? Your very own osculating curve? The one who rounds you up every day? Who's always acute even when you're obtuse? Don't worry, my friends! The MATLAB Community Blog has you covered. We've been hard at work, combing through the File Exchange, looking for exactly what you need. Because nothing says "I love you" quite like a delicate bouquet of code (and its accompanying image). There are so many hidden gems on the File Exchange, treasures large and small, patiently waiting to be discovered. Here I present to you Valentine, by Richard Schulman. Valentine But wait... there's more! Don't just pique their interest when you can bowl them over. As an extra floral bonus. I'm going to give you something written by Alison Eele, from our UK office. Alison fashioned this from an algorithm originally written by

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The other day I received this email from my friend Jos. Very thoughtful of him! After a recent meeting, we were discussing the UK's notable decline in coal consumption. Jos had found some data from a government website and shared it with me via MATLAB Drive. Please note that all the numbers shown here have to do with the energy used to generate electricity (as opposed to, say, heat or transportation). Because we both use MATLAB Drive, Jos can leave his code and data in place and just issue the invitation. Once I accept it, I can work in the same exact folder, thereby avoiding a lot of back and forth messaging with attachments. I accepted the invitation and saw a folder with a spreadsheet, two import routines, and a file called runme.m. Here's that runme.m file from Jos. And when I run it, this is the result. Sure

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Guest bloggers Ishaani, a MathWorks UX Specialist, and Vidya Gopalakrishnan, a MathWorks Senior Technical Writer, bring you this story of organization and outreach amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.

MathWorkers are finding ways to continue STEM outreach and learning, even during the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic that has us all learning and working from home. MathWorks hosted a virtual Pocket AI and IoT workshop and STEM panel with Black Girls CODE and with MissionSAFE August, organized and led by Louvere Walker-Hannon, who works closely with both organizations. Louvere is the Curriculum Lead for the Black Girls CODE Boston chapter and has close connections with the MissionSAFE organization and leadership. You can read more about Louvere in this article by the Society of Women Engineers, Women Engineers You

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Happy December! The days sure seem longer in the winter. Of course, there are fewer hours of daylight. But the actual span of the day seems longer. Or is that just a psychological effect? Let’s investigate!

How long is a day?

The first answer that jumps into your head is probably 24 hours. But that just leads to my next question. How long is an hour? If the first answer that jumps into your head 1/24 of a day, then you can see that there’s something circular going on.

If you think about it a little longer, you’re likely to come up with something like this. A day is the amount of time between one day and the next. But as measured by what? As modern folk, we tend to start with well-defined seconds and build up from there. One day equals 60 x 60 x 24 = 86,400 seconds. But seconds must have originally been defined in the other direction, starting with days. At this point, it helps to think like an Old One. How did the ancient Egyptians, for

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I’m happy this week to be talking to a fellow MathWorker: Savitha Raghunathan. Why, you may ask, should I use the MATLAB Community blog to talk to someone I work with? Because Savitha is a dedicated and active participant in the larger open source software development community, something that’s very important to us at MathWorks. She works in a platform infrastructure role here that supports the product development teams. That means she’s on the leading edge of learning about cloud technologies and how we can use and deploy them. In the world of cloud computing these days, all roads lead to (or through) the open source container management system Kubernetes. A few years ago Savitha took a great interest in Kubernetes and decided to get involved. And that is where our story begins.

Incidentally, you may notice a theme running through Savitha’s comments, a theme

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Because of the amazing contributions from community members like you, Cody has lots and lots of interesting problems to solve. In fact, it has so many problems that it can start to feel like a jungle, vast and intimidating. How do I even begin? Where should I start?

One way that we have addressed this is by making problem groups. This lets you pick a topic that catches your eye. Maybe you see Basics on Cell Arrays and you think to yourself, “You know, self, I don’t really understand cell arrays. This could be just the thing to bring me up to speed and improve my MATLAB skills.” Now you have a handy, focused set of ten problems to work through rather than a tangle of 3800 unsorted problems. And by the end of it, you’ll

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