Hi everyone!
Once again, the OCaml community has signed up to Outreachy (see past posts)!
What is Outreachy?
Outreachy is a paid, remote internship program. Outreachy promotes diversity in open source and open science. Our internships are for people who face under-representation, and discrimination or systemic bias in the technology industry of their country.
The current round is still ongoing with an intern making great progress on ocaml-api-watch with @NathanReb and @panglesd.
Important Dates
For this next round, the important dates are as follows (these are always subject to some change):
Our next deadline is for mentors to sign up to the OCaml community with a project idea. Please do consider being an Outreachy mentor. If you have any questions or ideas you can always reach out to me directly. If you need a refresher of past projects, there’s a dedicated page on the OCaml website: OCaml Outreachy Internships.
The OCaml community is currently able to financially support Outreachy internships thanks to the generous support of Tarides and Janestreet.
Thanks! 
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Hello!
I am an outreachy applicant, while I am wating for my initial application to get approved (hopefully), I am preparing for the contribution phase.
What are the prerequisites to contributing to OCaml and where should start?
Thankyou!
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Hey @Anushka_Paharia,
Welcome to the OCaml community! Right now we don’t have any projects so there’s no specific instructions for getting started/contributing.
If this is your first time with OCaml, I recommend some of the following resources:
This should help you get up and running. Do check back on the Outreachy website for specific OCaml projects that might interest you!
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Just a reminder that the deadline for mentors to sign up to projects is Friday 7th March 2025. Please do consider being a part of Outreachy, and as always if you have any questions you can send them my way.
Hey @patricoferris
I recently got approved for Outreachy, and I’m excited to contribute! I’m a JavaScript developer using Ubuntu Linux, and I’ve been exploring the OCaml repository while waiting for Outreachy to display project details.
I noticed that many files in the repository have the .exe extension, which is commonly associated with Windows executables. Would setting up a virtual machine help during the contribution phase, or should I consider switching to Windows?
Since I’m new to OCaml, I’d love any guidance on getting started, recommended learning resources, and best practices for contributing. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance!
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There’s no need to switch to Windows. 
The .exe extension produced by OCaml is a normal program you can run on Linux terminal with ./program_name.exe.
It’s a little bit of an unfortunate choice that OCaml and Windows use the.exe extension for different purposes but there’s no relation, and OCaml in fact runs better on Linux than on Windows.
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They’re not used for different purposes, the dune build tool uses the .exe extension for native executables that it builds from OCaml source code on all platforms for uniformity. This is explained in https://dune.build/
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Thanks; I think I misspoke and I appreciate you bringing it up we obviously don’t ant to mislead someone new to OCaml with unclear information.
My meaning was that Windows executables, including ones totally unrelated to OCaml (like firefox.exe for example) use the .exe extension as well. That extension is also used by OCaml, but the shared extension does not imply any relation or dependency between OCaml and Windows.
The shared .exe extension a tiny bit unfortunate because of the potential for confusion, but it’s honestly no big deal after a day with OCaml.
