Welcoming our new Outrechy interns

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Hello everyone :slight_smile: We’ve just started an amazing new round of Outreachy internships. Outreachy is a non-profit organization providing a structure for people underrepresented in open-source to do 3 months long internships in an open-source community. In the OCaml community, this Outreachy round, we’ve come up with four internship projects from different contexts. For three of them, we are fortunate to now have the following highly dedicated and enthusiastic interns working and being actively engaged in them:

  • @Seun is working on implementing a dark mode on ocaml.org. The project idea is to implement a dark theme for the website, and to choose a dark or light theme on the website based on the system preferences of the user.
    Mentors: @SaySayo and @punchagan
  • @fay is working on ocaml-joy, a creative coding library to draw geometric objects in OCaml. This is inspired by the python library of the same name. Joy offers the ability to draw simple shapes, perform transformations on them, and compose those transformations. This will be a great tool for teaching programming as well as creating art in a functional way.
    Mentors: @nikochiko and @sudha
  • @idara_nabuk is working on improving the GUI experience in OCaml. This has been inspired by Rust’s Are We GUI Yet?, and aims at doing a survey of the GUI libraries, writing documentation, tutorials and examples to benefit the community and make OCaml more GUI-friendly.
    Mentors: @gpetiot and @moazzammoriani
  • Unfortunately no intern was selected for the OCaml R*-tree project this round, but lots of great features, examples and tests were added during the contribution period.

It’s very gratifying to work as mentors and organizers on those projects and to see both the interns and the projects grow every day. As to who we are: We’re a mixed group of OCaml enthusiasts, some of whom work at Tarides and others don’t. Tarides has been letting employees be engaged in Outreachy internships and do other diversity and/or mentoring work as part of our job for a while now! And since last Outreachy round, the Tarides-external mentors are funded for their mentor efforts from Jane Street and Tarides. We appreciate both a lot!

Please, welcome @Seun, @fay and @idara_nabuk to the community!
We’re looking forward to how the internships are going to evolve,
@moazzammoriani, @gpetiot, @punchagan, @SaySayo, @nikochiko, @sudha, @pitag

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Thanks @gpetiot. I’m so excited to be here. The learning experience is a great one, and more so contributing to the community’s projects is exciting.

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Thank you so much for the warm welcome! I’m thrilled to be part of this incredible Outreachy internship with the OCaml community, and I’m especially excited about working on implementing a dark mode for ocaml.org.
I look forward to being an active part of this amazing journey.
Let’s make ocaml.org shine in both light and dark modes! :computer::sparkles:

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I’ve not dug into exactly how Outreachy operate, but it seems to be a thought-through process and clearly a worthwhile objective.

I have a work colleague who is very much into his dark mode, so maybe this will be the nudge I need to interest him in exploring ocaml.

I always like playing around with something concrete when learning a language, and drawing pictures is more fun than parsing CSV files. An ocaml version of “joy” should be a popular choice for quite a few learners I expect.

And GUI applications are a sticking point for a lot of languages (maybe all of them once you start talking about cross-platform applications).

So - thank you all in advance for your work on these projects (and thanks to your mentors for setting time aside to assist too).

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