With the conclusion of the previous Outreachy round (see End-of-Internship Demo Session), the next round is fast approaching and the OCaml community has signed up again to participate!
The deadline for mentors to signup is September 29 2023. The OCaml community has decided to try a slightly different approach that has worked very well in the previous round. We noticed quite a few people would like to be involved in an internship but without worrying too much about the details of Outreachy itself. If people are simply interested in mentoring and they maintain an open-source project, then they can reach out directly to @pitag or myself and we can help scope a project, explain the contribution period and provide as much other help as we can!
When signing up mentors propose an open-source project where prospective interns submit PRs during the “contribution phases” as part of their application. Mentors will then choose an intern to work with for 3 months. A more detailed explanation is available on the Outreachy mentor section.
Finally, Tarides and OCaml Software Foundation have been very generous so far funding our efforts on the intern side. Since the previous round, Jane Street and Tarides have gone a step further and have also provided funding for the mentor side! Mentoring does take time, but you get a lot back from it on different levels and hopefully this financial help can lower the barriers to being a mentor.
As always if you have any general questions or mentoring ideas do comment on this thread or reach out to us directly.
I briefly mentioned in the Rtree announcement that extending the library to support some of the newer Rtree variants might be a fun project. If anyone is interested in co-mentoring or would like to just help in a very low commitment way, do reach out :))
Hi! I want to join as a co-mentor in this round of Outreachy. I am a recent Outreachy alum.
I worked on the MIDI over Ethernet project in the Summer Outreachy round, under @pitag , @rand, and @moazzammoriani .
I had a great time during the project and would like to continue growing in the field. And I hope to use my newly gained experience to try to help newcomers this time.
Very, very cool. Was that related to Cardio Crumble? If you are interested in co-mentoring the R*-tree project could you send me an email (contact info https://patrick.sirref.org) or DM on here. If you would rather wait for a different project that’s cool too :))
I just concluded my internship with OCaml working Persistent Storage for MirageOS Unikernels. My internship was amazing. I was a beginner but by the time the internship ended I had already learned so much, all thanks to my mentors, especially @reynir
Mentoring is amazing and because I had a mentor I could learn faster than if I was working on my own. So I encourage everyone who has a bit of time and is passionate about helping newbies like myself get up and running with OCaml to apply.
I will be sure to assist in the various forums and github issues when I come accross beginners who have difficulties.
I was a mentor during this last round, and it has been a great experience - both a super team of mentors and enthusiastic and cool interns. Can fully recommend it to anyone thinking about becoming mentors!
To me it was especially nice to see the development of the interns, and be a guide of their process of learning and becoming OCaml developers. It also makes you see how FP, OCaml and the ecosystem looks from a beginners angle, which is quite interesting
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