I’m obviously just getting started, although cannot say this is my first post ever. The question is where to start. While there are countless blogs from those with computer science and web development backgrounds, I represent a different world of engineers being those with mechanical and electrical engineering backgrounds.
Due to universities paying huge licensing fees, what is commonly taught are platforms such as Matlab and increasingly National Instruments LabVIEW. Due to students being educated and brought up on these platforms, they are also heavily relied upon within industry. If you are in a company and have access to these programs, they are extremely capable, and it may be above your pay grade to change them and likely years of work built upon them. However, if you’re learning on your own, starting your own company, or potentially putting together a new group and may not have the budget for them, this blog may be of interest to you. At the time of this post, one license to Matlab is $2150 (pricing can be found here), which does not include Simulink (an additional $3250) nor the tool kits that really make Matlab valuable.
Having young kids, I’m extremely excited about the open-source community. While I understand the need to protect our hard work on the software side, I must share my appreciation for the opensource community. Our historical concepts of sharing ideas through the paper and conference system are alive and well within the opensource community. Allowing the community to work together and share tools allows our ideas not to be constrained to prohibitively expensive software packages, but enables our own ideas to sprout and grow.
As a parent, I further appreciate the opportunities that our children have to explore an incredible number of new concepts. Examples include analyzing our exercise / sports data through Python assisted with Pandas to creating videos in Blender with our kids, opensource is increasing our opportunities for learning at an amazing rate.