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.
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.
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 :)) ?
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.
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.
Hi @moazzammoriani and @reynir, this is very, very awesome news! In particular, I’m really glad to see you back mentoring this time @moazzammoriani. And although I’m biased, I am also very happy to see Mirage projects on the list!
Having three projects revolve around a common theme has given us the option to be bit flexible with how we’re allocating mentor time
Nice! Perhaps that is something we can suggest for future rounds to help with the mentoring.
Please do let me know if there’s any way I can help, I’ll be taking a break this round to focus on some other OCaml things but I’m only ever an email/slack/matrix away ^^
Likewise, great to have you on board as mentors @moazzammoriani@reynir! I’m struggling a bit with the Outreachy approval web interface, but all those projects look good to go.
Just one question: it got flagged by Outreachy since the projects were registered as not being under an OSI approved open-source license, but on reading them it seems that they are standard enough ISC/BSD licensed. I’m just flagging that so you’re aware that Outreachy projects must all be released openly to qualify for the program (but I’m pretty sure this is the case with yours)
That is odd. The existing projects are all open source, and I think we agree the MIDI libraries will be made open source as well - though at the moment there is nothing to license. Maybe @moazzammoriani has a clue? Thank you for raising attention to this.
@avsm thanks pointing this out. All the projects are indeed OSI approved open-source licenses. It appears that in two of the projects the relevant check-boxes asserting this were not checked. This has been rectified though. I hope this did not cause too much trouble.
Just wanted to say that I also submitted an OCaml Outreachy project!
The goal of the project is to improve the error reporting in the PPXs ecosystem. This includes both modifying ppxlib’s behavior when catching an exception raised by a rewriter; and modify existing PPXs to better report error (by embedding them inside the AST when relevant, allowing for both multiple error reporting, and creation of a partial AST that contains all information that could be created).
Hi everyone, I’m abongwa, an intern too for ocaml this outreachy cohort, I’m working in the project “Improve error reporting in existing ppxlib-based PPXs”, my mentor is @panglesd, I’m excited to be here😊
!