Interesting OCaml Articles

I thought it would be nice to have a list of sightings of OCaml blog postings, social media, video and such around the web. This way, we can show proper support and appreciation to people who create this content, and make sure they get an audience.

Feel free to add whenever you come across something. Reason posts are ok too, I think, as long as they’re not too javascript-oriented, since that would prevent average OCamlers from following.

I’ll start off with a neat medium post I found by @bobbypriambodo via reddit: Starting an OCaml app project using Dune. Nice post, Bobby!

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Thank you for the mention, @bluddy! As said in the article, I plan to publish several more posts on that level. Hopefully I can get to it in the upcoming week. Feedbacks are welcome.

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I should also include Bobby’s earlier medium articles, Getting Your Feet Wet With OCaml and Lightweight OCaml Docker Images with Multi-Stage Builds, which mixes some OCaml setup with Docker-fu.

Sorry for posting these out of order – keep it up!

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Might be nice to have an OCaml blog that posts links to such things and other news stories, perhaps off of an ocaml.org domain name.

There is https://ocaml.org/community/planet/ but it is not an aggregation made by hand, so there is a little bit of off topic sometimes.

Great idea. Since there are talks of updating the ocaml.org website, I agree it would be nice to have a curated, user-maintained list as one of the site’s features.

This thread is more similar to the OCaml subreddit, except that the subreddit has a lot of noise and in general I’ve found that reddit ages badly. I also think more exposure for material is always a good thing. Let’s reward the people who put in the effort as much as we can.

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Something like this?
https://ocaml.org/community/planet/

Alan

I didn’t know that https://ocaml.org/community/planet/ existed (or I had forgotten). Perhaps it needs to be more prominent, and/or even to get its own planet.ocaml.org URL? Though what I had in mind would be slightly more curated, as @Khady noted, it seems to get off topic sometimes because it’s just a combination of other people’s blogs.

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Well, it is on the landing page of the site — the News column to the right. Isn’t it enough?

Filtering is done by the blog author. When they submit a feed, blog authors are encouraged to actually filter their feed to posts tagged with, say, OCaml. If a post is off topic, please notify the author who may not be aware of the incorrect tagging (there are links to the right of the post title).

Everybody can add their own feed, see the OCaml Planet Syndication.

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Yah, failing to notice is likely my fault. I assumed that was just for OCaml version announcements etc. Unlike some things, this clearly is on me for being thick.

Actually, I think I know why I ignored it. The pinned top story is about the OCaml 2017 event last September, and my mind kept thinking nothing new was showing up there when I glanced at it. Perhaps that could be unpinned now?

I don’t think it is. Given that this is the main thing expert OCamlers want from the site, I think it should have its own dedicated navbar button at the top (News). The small News widget will often have nothing of interest in its reduced feed, get lost in the noise, or just not make it clear that it’s clickable. Meanwhile, going to the Community page, I can’t find any way to get to the Planet, which again, is currently the most important functionality for expert users. This is just some of the critique I have about the site. I opened a PR about the rest. Hopefully I can contribute some more changes soon to make the site more intuitive.

That seems like a good idea, and a reasonably small change.

Also probably a reasonably small change to fix that.

It is to the right of the second row.

Well, expert users won’t go to the community page to then go to the planet. The planet actually publishes a feed* to which you can subscribe…

* Indicated by image, as customary.

I meant expert users in terms of OCaml knowledge. RSS has been on a down trend, and it’s not a good idea to rely on it. I’ve actually forgotten about its existence until you mentioned it now, ever since the death of google reader (and recently, digg reader).

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Ugh. Please.

No, techs that you don’t use anymore are not all deprecated and dead. Many people have been following the planet’s feed for a long while. It has a nice webpage easy to consult for people that don’t want to subscribe. It’s not broken, don’t try to fix it.

If you want to be productive, maybe add a way to post one-time blog posts to the planet and try to think of a convenient way to have topics here to discuss interesting feed entries. I’ve been considering automatically posting feed entries to reddit for a while, but never got around to do it.

But please don’t try to reinvent yet-another content federation method.

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@Drup, I’m not trying to get rid of the planet – I think it’s great. I want it to be more prominent on the ocaml.org web page, and I think the way it’s currently presented (via indirect links) doesn’t make it visible enough. I’m also saying that having RSS as an option, while great, isn’t a justification for not increasing the page’s prominence since it’s so very important.

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This describes a subset of what’s in OCaml Planet, which means that in practice this stuff that @bluddy is describing, much of which would have a long shelf life–it would be relevant for a long time–could get pushed down by job ads, compiler hackathon notices, etc. in OCamp Planet. Maybe there would be value to a second, specially curated collection for the sort of thing that @bluddy is talking about.