Outreachy Week 1

A little about myself

Hello everyone! 👋👋

I am Shreya Pawaskar, an Artificial Intelligence and Data Science graduate from Mumbai, India. This summer I am interning with OCaml org for the project Claudius in the June 2025 to Aug 2025 outreachy cohort. Super excited for all the fun learnings coming ahead. 🙌

I love exploring new languages and frameworks. In my free time I prefer reading philosophy, fiction and exploring good art and music.

A little fun fact: I am a lot into Afrobeats these days 🎶🎶

Why Outreachy? The Heart and Hustle Behind My Application

I was fairly new to opensource contributions when outreachy initial applications were opened. After filling out the initial applications, I started learning the language OCaml. When the initial results came out, I was so happyyyyy!

Outreachy internship happened at the perfect moment in my life. Learning to contribute to big code bases can be intimidating at times. There are so many new things to learn: raising PRs, opening issues, managing changes on local and remote repos and then the dreaded - merge conflicts ofcourse!

I got to learn all this under the guidace of my mentor Michael Dales. He not only guided me to learn all this but also helped develop better coding practices. There are these little nuances that one can only learn when someone with a lot of experience reviews your code and suggests betterments. I am glad that this opportunity provided me that! ✨✨

Learning by Doing: My Contribution Period Experience

Contributions phase is one of the most challenging phases in any open source program. Some people find understanding the code base difficult and others just give up by seeing the sheer number of contributors and the big complicated PRs they make. But this is where “not giving up“ matters the most!

If I had to list down some tips a.k.a. my learnings from this phase:

• Try to brush up your tech stack before the contribution period starts.

• Choose your project wisely. Your chosen project must excite you to contribute to it. This thing single handedly stops us from giving up when encountered with errors.

• Setting up projects locally can be challenging and hence always seek out for help if stuck. Remember, the earlier you set your project up, the earlier you start contributing.

• Look for good first issues in the beginning phase of your contributions and gradually escalate the difficulty. This will help you gain confidence in your skills.

• Keep comunicating with your mentors about the changes you propose and the difficulties you face. They are always there to help and support us.

• Work on the feedback you recieve by your mentors.

• Help your fellow contributors in the things you can. Collaboration is the spirit of opensource.

Andddd you are good to go!

Moments That Mattered: My Proudest Contribution

This one definitely has to be the seg fault error In WSL.

You can view it here if it interests you: Seg Fault Error

Also, a link to my github: pawaskar-shreya

For context, Segmentation fault is not a very commom type of error in OCaml. Usually exceptions are raised if something fails. But I was encountering this error whilst working with the SDL window on WSL. I had reported this error and got to know from my mentor that not everybody was facing it even after being on WSL. So it was not reproducible on my mentor’s end.

I really wanted to solve this error as I had reported it and it was not reproducibe. Andddd I soved it in the end. But the roller coaster journey that this error was!

It involved using the gdb to debug the core dump and then using the backtrace to see the stack. That’s when I found out there was an issue with the ‘libd3d12core.so”. And then a little more hunting through reddit and github discussions lead me to the solution. It definitely taught me how to debug things. 🙌

I had never even heard of any of the above terms before. And then being able to get a PR merged to solve this error was so gratifying.

What’s to come?

Our project Claudius is a library for OCaml to do retro-style graphics. Our goal is provide a library for our users to learn OCaml in a fun and engaing way.

The project in itself is a very visually rewarding one. I hope to sharpen my own skills and make contributions that matter. Many more visually appealing changes to come……

PS: I just had a meeting with my mentor and we discussed the how-to’s of remote working.

Thanks for reading and see you in the next blog. 👋👋