Open Source Mentorship?

Learning
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I saw that OCaml was part of GSoC (and other open source mentorship programs) a few years or so back.

Does that still exist in any form now?

I’m a beginner in OCaml (and functional programming) and am looking for some sort of mentorship/program that would enable me to make open source contributions.

Thanks!

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I think the ocaml community participate in Outreachy.

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Yes that’s right. @gridbugs is mentoring some people on Outreachy this year as far as I am aware.

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Hi @Prince_Kumar (OCaml Community Outreachy Coordinator here)

I’m happy to hear that you would like to contribute to some open-source OCaml projects! The OCaml community currently participates in Outreachy. It may be a little late this round to get involved but we will most likely be participating in the next round at the end of the year, and if you’re eligible please do apply!

If you’re interested to hear more about this, we have our demo day tomorrow for the current round and you are more than welcome to hop on the call!

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Oh this is cool. Unfortunately I don’t think I’d be eligible for Outreachy it seems.

Is there anything similar? Or is there some like informal list of opensource stuff/problems that I could try working on? I think that would be a fun challenge for me to work towards even without direct mentorship (I don’t care about stipends either).

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A general recommendation that I give for people trying to start contributing to open source: just do it.

Find a project that you are interested in (most likely because it is a program that you particularly enjoy and would like to help improve), go to their github repo/sign up for the dev mailing list/etc and start learning about the code and the general development flow. Small refactors and cleanups of the code are a good way to get started and are likely to get accepted by the development team, as everyone likes those.

If you have specific things that you would like to improve, even better, you can try implementing them and then proposing them for integration upstream (if you don’t manage to implement it, you may need to learn more about the code before attempting your change).

In general, people are happy to receive new contributions, with the caveat that coordinating the integration of contributions by random contributors across the internet is a lot of work and there are many other factors to consider than just the code, so don’t get discouraged if your first contributions end up not being merged.

Cheers,
Nicolas

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Good idea. I think I’ll just focus on learning OCaml to an intermediate level first and then look at contributions I can make.

Links for future readers (and future me):

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Note that there are loads of other interesting OCaml projects besides the compiler, where the bar for contributions is particularly high.

Cheers,
Nicolas

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Since you seem to be looking to contribute, let me advertise my projects.

Maybe you could try to contribute to gamelle: GitHub - art-w/gamelle: 2d game engine for OCaml ?

Its a little game engine, nothing important for the community, but the codebase should be relatively simple compared to other things.

Also, ocamlformat has very little contributors, if you wanted to invest the time to get into the codebase it could be great for the community. Its a complicated project with loads of technical debt, but once you get into it you can have a fast feedback loop on modifications which is fun. I would like showing you the codebase if you are interested.

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