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OCaml.org Newsletter: May 2024

Welcome to the May 2024 edition of the OCaml.org newsletter! This update has been compiled by the OCaml.org team. You can find previous updates on Discuss.

Our goal is to make OCaml.org the best resource for anyone who wants to get started and be productive in OCaml. The OCaml.org newsletter provides an update on our progress towards that goal and an overview of the changes we are working on.

We couldn't do it without all the amazing people who help us review, revise, and create better OCaml documentation and work on issues. Your participation enables us to so much more than we could just by ourselves. Thank you!

This newsletter covers:

  • Recipes for the OCaml Cookbook: Help us make the OCaml Cookbook really useful by contributing and reviewing recipes for common tasks!
  • Community & Marketing Pages Rework: We have UI designs for the reworked and new pages of the community section and are starting to implement these. We made progress towards showing videos from the community on the OCaml Planet.
  • General Improvements: As usual, we also worked on general maintenance and improvements, so we're highlighting some of the work that happened below.

Open Issues for Contributors

You can find open issues for contributors here!

Here are some (as of writing this newsletter) open issues:

Recipes for the OCaml Cookbook

The OCaml Cookbook is a place where OCaml developers share how to solve common tasks using packages from the ecosystem.

A recipe is a code sample and explanations on how to perform a task using a combination of open source libraries.

The Cookbook is live at ocaml.org/cookbook, but there are not a lot of recipes published yet.

When the cookbook was merged, all pull requests to the cookbook branch were automatically closed. We recreated these pull requests and they are ready for review.

Here's how you can help:

  1. Review open pull requests for cookbook recipes!
  2. Contribute new recipes and tasks for the cookbook!

Relevant PRs and Activities:

Community & Marketing Pages Rework

This month, we made some progress towards adding videos from the OCaml community (e.g., from YouTube and watch.ocaml.org) to the OCaml Planet.

Since the size of the OCaml Planet RSS feed grew so large that automation tools (dlvr.it) could no longer process it, we reduced the timeframe for posts to show up in the RSS feed to the last 90 days.

Contributor @ishar19 opened a pull request to add an RSS feed for the Community/Events page. This will allow posting new events to various social media automatically and allow you to subscribe to the Events RSS feed with a RSS reader of your choice.

We have UI designs for the reworked and new pages of the community section and we are opening small issues for contributors to help. :orange_heart:

Relevant PRs and Activities:

Outreachy Internship on Interactive Exercises

On May 27, Divyanka Chaudhari started working with the team, as an Outreachy intern. She's implementing support for running the exercises as a stand-alone project, either in GitHub Codespace, in repl.it, using Jupyter or LearnOcaml.

Relevant PRs and Activities:

General Improvements and Data Additions

Notable Changes:

  • We restructured the main navigation to have a "Tools" section that holds the OCaml Platform page and the OCaml compiler releases page. This should make the OCaml Platform page easier to find.
  • The Changelog can now be found under "News", from the main navigation. You can also find the OCaml Planet and the Newsletters in this new section.
  • The OCaml Language Manual is now served from OCaml.org, instead of v2.ocaml.org.
  • We added some more links to learning resources to the Resources page at https://ocaml.org/resources.
  • Some documentation updates on "Is OCaml Web Yet?", "Is OCaml GUI Yet?", the ThreadSanitizer tutorial, and the "Functors" tutorial.

Relevant PRs and Activities: