OCaml.org Newsletter: March 2024

Community
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Welcome to the March 2024 edition of the OCaml.org newsletter! This update has been compiled by the OCaml.org team. You can find previous updates on Discuss.

Our goal is to make OCaml.org the best resource for anyone who wants to get started and be productive in OCaml. The OCaml.org newsletter provides an update on our progress towards that goal and an overview of the changes we are working on.

We couldn’t do it without all the amazing OCaml community members who help us review, revise, and create better OCaml documentation. Your feedback enables us to better prioritise our work. Thank you!

This newsletter covers:

  • OCaml Cookbook: A prototype of an OCaml cookbook that provides short code examples that solve practical problems using packages from the OCaml ecosystem is on OCaml Cookbook.
  • Dark Mode: We enabled the dark mode on all pages of OCaml.org, based on your operating system / browser settings.
  • Community & Marketing Pages Rework: We are seeking feedback on wireframes for the community section and for the marketing-related pages.
  • General Improvements: As usual, we also worked on general maintenance and improvements based on user feedback, so we’re highlighting some of our work below.

Open Issues for Contributors

You can find open issues for contributors here!

Upcoming OCaml Cookbook

We’re in the process of adding a community-driven section to the Learn area: the OCaml Cookbook. This cookbook is designed as a collection of recipes, offering code samples for tackling real-world tasks using packages from the OCaml ecosystem. It’s a practical effort to enrich our learning resources, making them more applicable and useful for our community.

This month, our focus shifted towards finalizing the cookbook for release. This includes

  • restructuring the directory structure and placement of recipe files, and
  • adding tasks to the cookbook, so that you can contribute recipes for these tasks (we took inspiration from the excellent Rust Cookbook).

It will always be possible to propose more tasks for the OCaml Cookbook. The main criteria here are:

  1. task must require more than just a single Standard Library function call to solve,
  2. task must be focused on common problems that occur when trying to build products,
  3. if in doubt, make the task more specific, instead of more generic.

A good place to give feedback on the cookbook is this discuss thread.

Relevant PRs and Activities:

Dark Mode Released

We’re happy to anounce that we shipped the Dark Mode for OCaml.org. Dark mode is activated based on your operating system / browser settings. If you see anything wrong, please open an issue and include the URL on which you’re seeing a problem.

Relevant PRs and Activities:

Homepage & Marketing Pages Rework

The Home page project kicked off with an analysis of user surveys and interviews, and the development of an initial wireframe for the homepage and the “Industrial Users” and “Academic Users” pages.

We’ve been reaching out to the community on Discuss and Twitter to find what people say about OCaml, so we can give a bit more context through testimonials on the “Academic Users” page.

Besides this, we’ve been asking on Twitter for ideas for the main tagline of the homepage

You can comment on the wireframes in Figma here.

If you have opinions on the homepage, feel free to share them in this discuss thread!

Community Section Rework

This week, we focused on creating wireframes for the Event, Job, Internship, and Workshop pages, followed by soliciting feedback from the community via Discuss. Concurrently, work commenced on the UI design for the Community Landing page, as well as the Event and Job pages.

We also made some improvements to the Events section on the Community page. This involves better treatment of start/end times of events, as well as listing more upcoming events.

If you have opinions on the community section, feel free to share them in this discuss thread!

Relevant PRs and Activities:

Outreachy Application Period & Internship

In March, OCaml.org hosted the application period for one Outreachy internship on creating an interactive experience for solving OCaml exercises.

The process of selecting an Outreachy intern involved creating and managing 15 issues, reviewing 61 pull requests from 8 applicants. The tasks were similar in nature and dealt with restructuring the exercises to enable an interactive experience, adding test cases and solutions (where missing).

Relevant PRs and Activities:

General Improvements and Data Additions

Relevant PRs and Activities:

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