Outreachy Summer 2023

Community
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Yep, it’s that time of the year again! Outreachy has officially started asking for organisations and mentors for the Summer 2023 round.

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.

Given the long discussion in What are the biggest reasons newcomers give up on OCaml? I can guarantee you that if you want some more really good answers, participating in Outreachy is one way to do that!

To help get a feel for what is to be a mentor, Outreachy will be holding a livestreamed call with previous mentors taking part which should be available on peertube (I’ll post links when available).

Important Dates

  • Jan. 17 at 3pm UTC - Mentor chat on YouTube and PeerTube
  • Feb. 6 at 3pm UTC - Mentor chat on YouTube and PeerTube
  • Feb. 10 at 4pm UTC - Deadline for open source and open science communities to sign up to be an Outreachy mentoring organization
  • Feb. 24 at 4pm UTC - Deadline for mentors to submit project descriptions for May 2023 interns to work on

This round

We had some excellent proposals for projects working on the compiler but unfortunately in the end no intern was found for it, please don’t be disheartened by this and I hope to see more projects suggested.

I’ve had the great fortune of working with Prisca on ocaml-topojson which has come on leaps and bounds thanks to her work! We’ll have a proper debrief towards the end of the project like the previous two rounds, although it may be a little shorter given the OCaml community only has one intern this round.

The older, but still relevant post Become an Outreachy Mentor: support the growth and diversity of the OCaml community contains some more information about being a mentor which you may want to take a look at.

Please uses this thread for any questions, ideas or thoughts. Thank you :camel: !

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From OCaml.org: recapping 2022 and queries on the Fediverse - #27 by avsm

@avsm said:

My personal hope is that someone will start building complete ActivityPub bindings in OCaml so we can start having some Fediverse fun in our own language

Maybe this would be a good project idea if someone is willing to do a little thinking around what that might look like :)) ?

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Friendly reminder the live chat will take place on Outreachy - Diode Zone tomorrow (17th Jan. 2023) at 3pm UTC. Whilst primarily focused on helping prospective applicants, it is still super useful for mentors to understand the process to help them out when the time comes.

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Hello! Me, @rand and @pitag intend to co-mentor on two projects related to Mirage. We have not set in stone what the projects will be, but we have some ideas. Suggestions and feedback is very welcome.

One idea is to work on the story of persistent storage in OCaml. Specifically,

  • write tests and example unikernels for existing libraries (MBR, tar, …),
  • work on a gpt implementation (an old non-functional implementation exists),
  • a scratch space / swap-like library for keeping track in memory of temporary allocations on a block device. This can be used in conjunction with MBR or GPT and the tar filesystem. The tar filesystem is append-only, and for that reason the scratch space can be useful for temporarily storing files downloaded over http before committing them to the filesystem once the final size is known or the checksum matches an expected hash.

We have as well a few ideas about (better) support for MirageOS on micro controllers and Raspberry Pi. We are investigating the possibility of shipping hardware to interns and what micro controllers could be relevant.

Other ideas is picking up an old ntp-client project or working on conntest: GitHub - rand00/conntest: MirageOS unikernel to test networking

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