MathWorks

On 12/14/2007, I received an email from Doug Hull, who runs the Pick of the Week blog at the official MathWork’s website. In his email, he was interested in featuring blinkdagger as the Pick of the Week! Of course, we were pretty excited that a MATLAB celebrity like Doug would recognize a blog like ours. Being featured on his blog really helped us gain exposure and authority in the MATLAB niche. In addition, he even gave us some cool MATLAB t-shirts.

One thing led to another. A few weeks later, Scott Hirsch, a Program Manager at The MathWorks, asked if Quan and I would be interested in applying for a position at The MathWorks. Both of us sent in our resumes and went through the interview process.

Before I knew it, I had accepted a position at The MathWorks! My start date end of 2008. This is very significant news, and I wanted to share the news with all of our readers. Also, I forgot to mention that this is the 100th post for Blinkdagger! Below is a quick history of our website and the plans we have in store for the future.
Note: Quan also received an offer from The Mathworks, but declined the offer.

The Motivation

I am sure we all have googled our names in the past out of curiosity. Even if your name is crammed on the search engine space with 5 other people of the same name, you will eventually find a unique link that describes you. Whether this description is interesting and meaningful is difficult to control for the vast majority.

With Facebook, Linked In, Blogger and other internet social medium, you can customize the imprint you are leaving on the Internet. But revealing what my favorite movies are on my profile was not the Internet ownership I sought. I wanted to be part of something big, something with an impact. I wanted people to remember me for the work I did. I have failed several times in the past to get anything going. I knew I could not do this alone, so I asked my best friend Quan Quach to form a partnership.

Finding our Identity

Finding our niche was no easy task. It felt like we started several years behind everyone else and that all the good ideas were already taken. Neither Quan nor I felt like we possessed special knowledge superior to anyone else. As dismal as this looked, we understood how we could be successful in two simple steps 1) Make it quality 2) Make it easy to understand. The next question we faced was a difficult one, “What do we write about?”

In the very beginning, Quan and I were figuring out how to get a hosting program called Listchecker to work. People complained it was difficult to set up and that instructions were not detailed enough. We decided to take all the information available on Listchecker and to convert it into a tutorial that was easy to understand and easy to follow. The Listchecker tutorial became an instant hit (150+k views and 750+ comments). The same information is available elsewhere, but our 2 criteria set us apart. With this initial success we decided to transfer the same framework to our other strength, MATLAB.

If You Build It, They Will Come

Given enough time and patience, most of us can probably figure out what we need through the Help and Documentation that MATLAB provides. If that fails you can probably find your answer on google or ask in the compsys forum. But like many of you have experienced, many tutorials have skipped steps, contain unclear directions, or are filled with unnecessary technical jargon. We felt like this something worth exploring. We launched a series of tutorials focused on MATLAB GUIs. The series have been quite successful and we have received many thank you emails in the past few months. We were really encouraged with the feeback. Soon after, we received an e-mail from Doug on that fateful day, and the rest is history.

What now?

My decision to join The MathWorks will hopefully become a catalyst for this site to grow. We envision this site to offer the best MATLAB tutorials on the net. Although we are still in a beta phase, there is certainly a lot of new things brewing behind. We can’t wait to share them with you. To satisfy some of your curiosity we will be incorporating

  • New MATLAB series
  • Much needed Forum for better Q&A (Apologize to those who I missed in responding to their MATLAB questions)
  • Moderated Links Database
  • Brand new layout

We hope you share the same excitement as us. We are also extending invitations to people who want to contribute to our site (especially if you are interested in working for MathWorks!). We’ve had some guest posters recently (Rob Slazas and Will Dwinnel) who have written some excellent posts. We look forward to hearing from everyone!