Main Content

Results for


On Valentine's day, the MathWorks linkedIn channel posted this animated gif
and immeditaely everyone wanted the code! It turns out that this is the result of my remix of @Zhaoxu Liu / slandarer's entry on the MATLAB Flipbook Mini Hack.
I pointed people to the Flipbook entry but, of course, that just gave the code to render a single frame and people wanted the full code to render the animated gif. That way, they could make personalised versions
I just published a blog post that gives the code used by the team behind the Mini Hack to produce the animated .gifs https://blogs.mathworks.com/matlab/2024/02/16/producing-animated-gifs-from-matlab-flipbook-mini-hack-entries/
Thanks again to @Zhaoxu Liu / slandarer for a great entry that seems like it will live for a long time :)
This was a very popular post at the time - many thousands of views. Clearly everyone cares about ODEs in MATLAB.
This made me wonder. If you could wave a magic wand, what ODE functionality would you have next and why?

Every day, thousands of people ask questions on MATLAB Answers and many of these are about their code. Questions such as “How can I make this faster?”, “Why do I get this error message?” or “Why don’t I get the answer I expect?”. There’s often one crucial thing missing though – the code in question!

Most of the people who answer questions on MATLAB Answers are volunteers from the community. They are answering your questions for fun, to learn more about MATLAB or just because they like to be helpful. This is even true for people such as me who are MathWorks members of staff. It’s not part of my role to patrol the community, looking where I can help out. I do it because I like to do it.

Make it easier to help me help you.

Imagine you’re a volunteer, looking for something interesting to answer. What kind of questions are you more likely to dig into and help an anonymous stranger figure out?

In my case, I almost always focus on problems that I can easily reproduce. I rarely know the answer to any question off the top of my head and so what I like to do is start off with the problem you are facing and use the various tools available to me such as the profiler or debugger to figure it out. This is the fun of it all for me – I almost always learn something by doing this and you get helped out as a side effect!

The easier I can reproduce your issue, the more likely I am to get started. If I can’t reproduce anything and the answer isn’t immediately obvious to me I’ll just move onto the next question. One example that demonstrates this perfectly is a case where someone’s MATLAB code was running too slowly. All of the code was available so I could run it on my machine, profile it and provide a speed-up of almost 150x.

It's not always feasible or desirable to post all of your code in which case you need to come up with a minimal, reproducible example. What’s the smallest amount of code and data you can post that I can run on my machine and see what you see? This may be more work for you but it will greatly increase your chances of receiving an answer to your question.