🐫 Documentation of my Outreachy internship working with OCaml 🐫

🪧 Table of Contents

• General info
• Features
• Overview of workflow & pair programming
  • Overview of workflow as in chart
  • Table of pair programming notes and workflow
• Planned outlook
• Outlook (when the PR was merged)
• Developed with
• Acknowledgement

📣 General info

• Project’s name: Building a monitoring and analytics dashboard for OCaml.org

• Purpose: Providing visibility on server performance and usage to OCaml.org users (metrics, statistics, analytics)

• Mentor: Thibaut Mattio (@tmattio)

📣 Source links

• Demo repository link: github.com/JiaeK/dream-dashboard

• PR: ocaml/ocaml.org#399 (merged on the 9 of April, 2022)

• Currently upstreaming on ocaml.org/dashboard/

• Source code is located in ocaml.org/src/ repo

• Next step suggestion is here

🌈 Features

• Checked box means implemented feature, ___ means implemented & actually upstreamed feature (at the time of the PR)

Overview page	Analytics page	Monitoring page	Logs page
Version of OCaml Version of Dream Version of the dashboard Uptime Host system information (OS, architecture, etc.)	Number of visitors Top countries Top sources Top pages Devices Browsers Operating system	Memory usage CPU usage Opened file descriptors Total I/O (input and output measured in Gb)	Report logs

🧭 Overview of workflow & pair programming

🔹Overview of workflow as in chart

🔹Table of pair programming notes and workflow

Before - Get familiarise with mirage-metrics (CPU, memory), Study & reference Phoenix.LiveDashboard

Pair programming #1 - Basic concepts of OCaml, How to reference OCaml API when writing OCaml, OCaml syntax

Pair programming #2 - Uptime, Returning to CPU, metrics-lwt

Pair programming #3 - Get familiarise with Dream, Implement a spin-dream project, How to reference build_info, alcotest

Pair programming #4 - Implement platform & CPU & uptime, Learn about Luv & ocaml-node-unix & I/O & mutex

Pair programming #5 - user agent, os, device info, events

Pair programming #6 - Revision, Refactoring

Pair programming #7 - top browser, top os, top devices, CPU usage & Started working with UI designers

Pair programming #8 - load average, memory usage, opened file descriptors, Started researching dashboard designs

Pair programming #9 - Attempt to implement log

Pair programming #10 - unique visitors, Adjust `open file descriptors, Get localization for IP addresses, Hash

Pair programming #11 - Temporary remove log, Get ready for upstreaming - opened PR for integration to ocaml.org , adjust TODOs

Pair programming #12 - Rebase, Add the total count of unique visitors, Fix memory usage & uptime, Remove I/O for now

Pair programming #13 - Aggregate, Make it more reponsive, Remove unuse code for now

Pair programming #14 - Rebase, Update privacy policy, Check everything before go upstream, Open an issue for the next steps

🗺️ Planned outlook

Disclaimer: this UI design and all the foundations of back-end code exist inside of the repo, but the actual outlook when the PR was merged is different as shown in the next paragraph

🔹Overview page

🔹Monitoring page

🔹Analytics page

📈 Outlook (when the PR was merged)

🔹Overview page

🔹Analytics page

🔧 Developed with

• OCaml : A functional, statically-typed programming language from the ML family, offering a powerful module system extending that of Standard ML and a feature-rich, class-based object system
• Dune : A build system designed for OCaml/Reason projects
• Dream : Easy-to-use, feature-complete Web framework without boilerplate
• crunch : Convert a filesystem into a static OCaml module
• dune-build-info : Embed build informations inside executable
• luv : A neatly-packaged OCaml/Reason binding to libuv, the cross-platform C library that does asynchronous I/O in Node.js and runs Node's main loop
• metrics-lwt : Lwt backend for the Metrics library
• user-agent-parser : OCaml implementation of the user agent parse rules of uap-core
• digestif : Hash algorithms in C and OCaml (SHA*, RIPEMD160, BLAKE2* and MD5)
• alcotest : A lightweight and colourful test framework that exposes a simple interface to perform unit tests
• odoc : OCaml documentation generator
• ppx_deriving_yojson : A plugin that generates JSON serializers and deserializes that use the Yojson library from an OCaml type definition
• yojson : JSON library for OCaml
• timedesc : OCaml date time handling and reasoning suite
• Tailwind CSS : A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom user interfaces
• Alpine.js: A rugged, minimal framework for composing JavaScript behavior in your markup

Acknowlegdement

• This project is inspired by Phoenix.LiveDashboard and plausible.io
• UI design by Asaad Mahmood
• 📺 Watch the final public presentation I organised & hosted with my amazing fellow interns: here
• 📰 Read more stories of my Outreachy internship experience on my blog