This week was my first full week back from the break and I found it challenging trying to get back into what I had been working on previously.
ICFP Papers
In conversation with Anil, we looked at options for submitting a paper to ICFP. I wrote up some notes on some options we discussed.
Forester
I spent some time this week converting this website to using Forester. I'm not a huge fan of the syntax, especially as a lot of my site's content was already in markdown. So I wrote a markdown frontend to forester which is available on Github.
The markdown frontend integrates very nicely and only a few changes were needed in the core logic of Forester itself. Additionally, for any features not directly supported in markdown there is an escape hatch using code blocks such as:
```forester
\put\transclude/numbered{false}
\transclude{pxf-1000}
```Personally, I'm still getting to grips with the bottom-up approach to building this site, atomically creating notes and reference cards that then are linked in many places.
I'm excited to see how I can integrate some of the Forester concepts into "Shark".
OCaml
In the OCaml world, I spent time on ppxlib, reviewing PRs to update the lower bounds of the library, fixing effect syntax problems and bumping internal AST to 5.2. I've also spent some time looking into de-objecting Eio, making the OCaml types more friendly to new users. I need to revive my port of Vpnkit to Eio for the thoughts on ICFP 2025 too.
I also want to modernise and make more public my OCaml code for creating little shells in OCaml too -- I think the ideas here really have legs and would like to find a conference to submit them too.
I also met with the single, OCaml Outreachy intern working on ocaml-api-watch.
Misc.
I met with most of my Part II students this week which was nice to catch up and see how their projects are going. I also started marking work for my first year students who are at the induction part of their Discrete Maths course.