Jon Ludlam's blog

Getting back to writing notes!

I have now finally finished almost all of the end-of-term duties, incuding marking of 128 Foundations of Computer Science exam questions.

The quality of reference documentation available in OCaml for libraries has improved enormously over the past few years.

...and previous weeks.

Over the past two weeks I've been mainly wrestling with odoc.

A two week update this week.

Once again, the docs CI went down.

As the chief maintainer of OCaml's odoc, I'm required to think hard about its future.

What did I do?

What did I do?

What did I do?

Here are my weeknotes for the last week, while I'm still writing up some more focused posts on some specific topics - like the experience of putting everything in a monorepo to create this site, and more notes on Claude and Agentic coding in general, and…

Let's make this really terse!

A combination one again as I took some time off due to school half term.

Highlights: day10 / javascript toplevels integration Scrollycode experiments Oxmono I spent some time on Anil's oxmono repo getting odoc to work correctly.

I've been battling the seasonal illnesses this week, so I've combined two weeknotes into one.

First week back of 2026!

Back in March of this year we released odoc 3.0.0, a major new version of the OCaml documentation generator.

SVGs are pretty cool - vector graphics in a simple XML format.

I recently completed lecturing the course "Foundations of Computer Science" to our newly arrived first-year computer scientists here at Cambridge.

Some results from the previous post.

This post is a brief write-up of a couple of bugs in odoc that I've been working on over the past 2 weeks.

The ocaml-docs-ci system works by watching opam-repository for changes, and then when it notices a new package it performs an opam solve and builds the package, a prerequisite for building the documentation.

mtelvers, dra27 and I have been working on a system to build opam packages similar to the way that the docs-ci system does - effectively building a per-package binary cache to do very fast builds of the entire opam repository.

For a few years now we've been running hub.cl.cam.ac.uk, a Jupyterhub instance, for the first year course "Foundations of Computer Science".

Here's a quick post on how to get the OCaml Language Server (ocaml-lsp-server) working with an MCP server.

LLMs are proving themselves superbly capable of a variety of coding tasks, having been trained against the enormous amount of code, tutorials and manuals available online.

More work this week on the OCaml MCP server.

Astonishingly, it's already been four whole months since starting back at the university, which I find incredibly hard to believe.

OCaml MCP server Last week I got the summarisation to the point where it felt useful to run it across all the modules in opam.

As of today, Odoc 3 is now live on OCaml.org!

It's been a busy few weeks.

merlinonly Some brief notes on last week.

The docs build is progress well, and we've just about hit 20,000 packages (20,038 to be precise).

I've been working on a whole lot of thing recently in many different areas, making what's felt like only a bit of progress in each.

My colleague Sadiq Jaffer and I have been working on a little project to see how well small AI models can solve the OCaml exercises we give to our first-year students at the University of Cambridge.

I joined the OxCaml weekly meeting representing Tarides for the first time this week, as Jane Street gear up to an official release of their OxCaml compiler.

Melissa Leach introducing the day Today was the "AI for Climate & Nature Community Day" at the David Attenborough Building.

The release of Odoc 3 means that we need to update the docs-ci project so that the documentation that appears on ocaml.org is using the latest, greatest Odoc.

Odoc 3 was released last month and although we did write a list of the new features, I don't think we've made it clear enough why anyone should care.

Semantic versioning is a lovely and simple idea that, if it were reliably implemented everywhere, would make life a lot simpler.

It's tremendously exciting to be back in the Computer Laboratory, as the last time I worked here was just before the pandemic.

I've spent a lot of time over the past few years working on Odoc, the OCaml documentation generator, so when it came time to (re)start my own website and blog, I found it hard to resist thinking about how I might use odoc as part of it.

There are many new and improved features that Odoc 3 brings, but there are also a large number of bugfixes.

Back in 2021 julow introduced some new syntax to odoc’s code blocks to allow us to attach arbitrary metadata to the blocks.