20 minutes makes a difference

I struggled to learn MATLAB at first. A colleague at my university gave me about 20 minutes of his time to show me some basic features, how to reference the documentation, and how to debug code. That was enough for me to start using MATLAB independently. After a few semesters of developing analyses and visualizations, I started answering questions in the forum when I had time. I became addicted to volunteering and learning from the breadth of analytical problems the forum exposed me to.



Have you ever solved a problem using a MathWorks product?

If your answer is YES, you may be the right person to help someone looking for guidance to solve a similar problem. Some answers in the MATLAB Central community forum maintain 1000s of views per month and some files on the File Exchange have 1000s of downloads. Volunteering a moment of your time to answer a question or to share content to the File Exchange may benefit countless individuals in the near and distant future and you will likely learn a lot by contributing too!

• 3616 questions were asked last month in the forum and in that time, 747 volunteers answered at least one question!
• 62% of those volunteers were first-time contributors!
• 335 volunteer contributors shared content in the File Exchange last month!
• 1: the number of contributions it takes to make a difference.

This week is National Volunteer Week in the USA (April 17-23). Challenge yourself and your colleagues by committing to help a stranger break barriers in their path to learning MATLAB.



How to volunteer and contribute to the MATLAB Central Community

Here are two easy ways to accept the volunteer challenge.

Contribute to the MATLAB Answers Forum

1. Go to the MATLAB Answers repository. This page shows all unanswered questions starting with the most recent question. Use the filters on the left to see answered questions or questions belonging to a specific category. Alternatively, search for questions using keywords in the search field or visit the landing page.
2. Open a few questions that interest you based on the question titles and tags.
3. Decide how you'd like to contribute. Sometimes a question needs refinement or requires a bit of work to address. Decide whether to leave a comment that guides the user in the right direction, answer the question, or skip to the next question. The decision tree below is how some experienced contributors approach these decisions.

Pro tips

• Newer questions have more traffic and are often answered within an hour or minutes.
• Multiple answers often add valuable alternative perspectives and solutions.
• Sometimes answers aren't accepted or the asker disappears. Be not discouraged. Your answer holds much value.



Contribute to the File Exchange

1. Choose a function, script, demo, or toolbox you created that may be helpful to the community.
2. Go to the MathWorks File Exchange. Search for submissions that are similar to your idea and decide whether your idea adds value.
3. Prepare your code for open-source sharing. The best submissions include brief documentation that explains the purpose of the code, inputs, expected outputs and limitations.
4. Use the "Publish your code" button from the link above. This will guide you through the submission process.



Make a difference

No matter what level you are at as a MATLAB developer, you have skills that others around you could benefit from learning. Take the challenge and become a giant.

Let us know about your experience with MATLAB Central volunteers or your experience becoming a MATLAB Central volunteer in the comments below!

The community team is pleased to release a new design for File Exchange review section. The new design has addressed major pain points we heard from File Exchange users and improves the overall experience. Major improvements include:

1. Support editing ratings/comments

Editing is probably the most popular feature request from File Exchange users. Now, you are able to edit your ratings/comments. Simply click the ‘Edit’ link below your content.

2. Support replying to a comment

In the old design, the only way for the file author to reply to a comment is to create a new comment, which is very hard to track. With the new design, the authors can directly reply to a comment and their post has a blue background making it easier to see. Due to differences between the old and new commenting structures, replies to comments couldn't be reliably inferred, so all comments added prior to 7/14 are at the same indentation level. Replies will be indented from now on.

3. Support rich formatting and attachments

Using the new rich text editor, you are able to choose bold/italic text, insert code or image, create lists, or attach files.

4. Introduce the ‘Discussions’ tab

There is a new ‘Discussions’ tab where community users have conversations with the author or other community members for Q&As or general discussions. The discussions section supports threaded discussions to facilitate the conversations. We separate Discussions with Reviews so that different types of content are not mixed together.

This is a major change for File Exchange and we look forward to hearing from you. Simply reply to this article if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions.

The File Exchange team is excited to announce that File Exchange now supports GitHub Releases!

Contributors can now develop software projects in GitHub without having to manually sync and maintain the same code in File Exchange.

To start using this feature, choose 'GitHub Releases' option when you update your existing File Exchange submission or link a new repository to File Exchange.

When you link your GitHub repository to File Exchange using GitHub Releases, your File Exchange submission will automatically update when you create a new release in GitHub that is compatible with File Exchange. In addition, if you package your code as a toolbox (.mltbx) and attach the toolbox package to your latest GitHub release, File Exchange will provide the toolbox to your users for download. If you do not attach a toolbox to the release, File Exchange will provide the zip release asset for download.

See this page for more details.

We encourage you to try out this feature and let us know of any feedback you have by replying below.

We are happy to announce that virtual badges can now be achieved for participating in MATLAB Central File Exchange . We have 30 badges that anyone can achieve, which will also boost your community profile. Some badges are relatively simple to get while others will depend on how useful your submissions are to others in the community. Check out Ned Gulley's blog post for a great introduction.