Outreachy Summer 2021

This summer the OCaml community rebooted its participation in Outreachy “…a diversity initiative that provides paid, remote internships to people subject to systemic bias and impacted by underrepresentation in the technical industry where they are living”.

We had the pleasure of working with three talented interns over 13 weeks this summer on projects relating to v3.ocaml.org. Each intern has summarised their experience in a blog post that we’d like to share with you.

A quick reminder, if you are interested in mentoring for the OCaml community in the next round, please read this post and apply with your project. The project submission deadline is Sept. 23, 2021 at 4pm UTC.

A Graphql Endpoint for Packages on OCaml.org

One of the centre-pieces for the ocaml.org revamp is centralised docs for every version of every opam package. With all of this information it would be useful to expose an API for exploring the packages. This is exactly what Odinaka Joy worked on and is live now at v3.ocaml.org/graphiql! For more information have a read of the accompanying blog post.

A Modern Front-end for OCaml.org

Another goal of v3.ocaml.org was to modernise the design and front-end of the site. This primarily meant splitting the data out and using modern tools like tailwind, react, nextjs and rescript to build a new front-end. Shreya Kumari Gupta has been driving this effort forward by porting more content, pages and designs into v3 including adding all of the academic institutions, industrial users and solving complicated nextjs-rescript-leaflet bindings. To learn about this and Shreya’s overall experience have a read of that blog post.

Peer-to-peer, privacy-focused video streaming for OCaml.org

Last and certainly not least we have OCaml.org’s peer-to-peer peertube instance where videos (such as the 2021 OCaml Workshop) are hosted with no tracking software and backed-up for posterity. Diksha Gupta worked on adding content, building tools to use the peertube API to query about the videos which ultimately creates a usable index of the videos in ood. For more on this project, look no further than the blog post.

It’s been a pleasure working with all of the interns this summer and we’re excited to see this initiative grow.

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