in december of 2025 i stumbled upon the mirageOS project - and my mind was blown.

i had never heard of unikernels before, but the concept just seemed the most natural thing in the world.

and then i found out that the core group working on this amazing project is meeting once a year in marrakesh.

i talked to my partner about the project, the meetup and how crazy cool i found all of it.

i had never worked on low-level systems nor with Ocaml but she encouraged me to apply - "they won't bite".

and so i applied to join the event, and was invited!

honestly - i had no business being there, besides being just...super super interested in the space, the people, the history of the project and everything else surrounding it!

the months leading up to the meetup were quite packed with preparation.

even if i couldn't immediately contribute to the project, i at least wanted to learn the basics of Ocaml, the language in which the whole project is written in.

and i wanted to understand the concept of unikernels better,

so i had quite some ground to cover.

it was challenging, FP (in the best sense) broke all my instincts for approaching problems.

in hindsight i can definitely say (as does nearly everyone that ever gave FP a try):

it improves your programming by teaching you something different than the imperative- or OOP-style of it.

i found it makes me think about a problem in a cascading "divide and conquer" (or simply put: in a recursive) way, which i really enjoyed.

and let me tell you: Ocaml is nice - i absolutely despise the tooling ecosystem, but the language and the individual libraries...i still have warm and cushy dreams about them.

but back to the event: it was amazing.

incredible humans, exceptional engineers and sooo welcoming.

to this day, i am moved by the buzzing mixture of vivid discussions, coding, talks, eating together...and simply getting to know each other.

the retreat was life-changing for me.

i had the opportunity to have in-depth conversations about technology, engineering and education with almost everyone of them. aaand - a long-standing conviction of mine became crystal clear fact:

if i ever want to be an active contributor to such kind of incredible engineering projects, i will have to acquire a lot of skills and knowledge.

beginning of 2027 i will join the 42Heilbronn piscine.

if i make it into the program, i will spend the next two years rebuilding my understanding of computers and programming skills from the ground up.

i am so excited for this new chapter and it's opportunities!

to everyone from the retreat and the amazing Ocaml/mirageOS community: from the bottom of my heart - THANK YOU.

-- gabriel