Meet a Mathcad Prime Developer

[DanMarotta]

Alan Belniak, Director of Social Media at PTC, had a chance to sit with Pradeep Selvakumar, a software development manager on the Mathcad Prime team. It turned into a great conversation, see for yourself.

• 0:00 Pradeep introduces himself
• 0:37 How the team is structured and arranged
• 1:20 Pradeep elaborates on the modified Agile methodology used on the team
• 2:28 The benefits of short iterations lead to greater transparency in the development process
• 3:10 Why the Mathcad Prime team is using WPF/Windows Presentation Foundation/.NET 4.0 for the user interface re-write
• 4:08 Separating the user interface of Mathcad from the calculation engine - why and how
• 4:42 Thoughts on personal accomplishments, and working on a desktop application

Direct link to video on YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLP9aipxSKE

Direct link to the Mathcad blog, http://blogs.ptc.com/bid/36325/Meet-a-Mathcad-Prime-Developer-Pradeep-Selvakumar

Would you like to see more of these impromptu interviews with PTC developers, executives and product managers?

[RogerMansfield]

Dan and Pradeep,

Thank you for doing this video and interview. For several decades I worked full-time in applications software development for space command & control systems.

So I have always wondered who the Mathcad "developers" are, until now. I have been sympathetic to the problems of development, and have called for fellow users' patience, because know what it's like to be on developer side of the developer/user interface (with Mathcad, I'm on the user side).

The biggest surprise to me about Mathcad Prime 1.0 has been the worksheet converter. I really expected it to be a piece of -- well, not to work very well. I was surprised and humbled.

I'm converting some fairly large worksheets (for me) -- 25-30 pages long. The biggest problem I'm having is with the lack of Math Styles. I created a Math Style that I call "Vectors and Matrices." It is the Variables Style, modified to use boldface type. This is to comply with a standard notation in orbital mechanics: the 3-vector r-bold has three components x, y, and z. The magnitude of r-bold, a scalar, is just denoted r ("r-unbold").

When the worksheet converter unbolds r-bold, the vectors now look like scalars, and the worksheets don't give correct results. The workaround I am using is to write r1 for the 3-vector and just r for its scalar magnitude. This works, but since I have many dozens of Mathcad 15 worksheets that use Math Styles, it is impractical to manually work around the lack of Math Styles for all existing worksheets.

I'm hoping that as you proceed to identify Mathcad 15 features that will be incorporated into later releases of Mathcad Prime, you'll not let Math Styles fall through the cracks.

So congratulations, Pradeep, on the release of Mathcad Prime 1.0.

And thanks, PTC, for sharing these Prime releases with all Mathcad users, and not just the testers. As has been noted elsewhere in these forums, most of us concur that it was a good idea not to keep Prime under wraps until it was deemed a full replacement of Mathcad 15.

Visibility into the PTC Mathcad business unit, at all levels, is definitely beneficial.

P.S. Thank you Alan Belniak, too -- I see now that it was you who conducted the interview and the blog!

Message was edited by: RogerMansfield

[abelniak]

Roger (and others),

You're welcome! Feedback like this is helpful - truly. We think that it's good to show you who's cooking your dinner, so to speak. So, we're showing you the chefs. But it's partially a guess on our part. Personally, I think it's nice. It makes the team human. It lets you see what people look like, it lets you hear the personal achievement a developer like Pradeep feels working on Prime. If you all want to see more of these kinds of videos, please let us know.

I'm hopeful you've watched the interview with Jake Simpson as well (http://blogs.ptc.com/bid/28732/Q-A-With-Jake-Simpson-Mathcad-Business-Unit-General-Manager). What else would you all like to see? Would you like an interview with a QA engineer? Technical documentation? What questions would you like to ask? Please let us know in the comments.

[MikeArmstrong]

We think that it's good to show you who's cooking your dinner, so to speak. So, we're showing you the chefs. But it's partially a guess on our part. Personally, I think it's nice. It makes the team human.

Alan,

I think this is a very good idea and would love to see a few more video's.

What else would you all like to see? Would you like an interview with a QA engineer? Technical documentation? What questions would you like to ask? Please let us know in the comments.

I would like to see the vision of Prime, where are we heading? What's next? What NEW features will be added to Prime 2.0?

I would love to speak to the programmers, the people behind the scenes who write all the programs and script files.

Mike