ISSTA/ECOOP was a blast! I had an amazing time at the summer school as well as the conference. It was really helpful to talk to mentors at the summers school and learn about the inner workings of academic life, conferences, and publications. The summer school lectures were also helpful introductions to areas of Programming Languages (PL) that I was not familiar with. It was particularly nice to get a chance to meet and talk to members of the PL community that I look up to as role models.

It was also helpful to talk to researchers from across the Atlantic whose work I have built up on. While I knew that we stood on the shoulders of giants, I didn’t know that the giants would be this friendly! I was able to learn about the original motivations behind their work and get their advice on related work that I am not familiar with yet.

The keynotes I attended were a lot of fun. I particularly liked the Curry On and ISSTA keynotes. From the Linear Haskell keynote, it was nice to see that linear types could be used in a realistic language. The Code Phonology keynote asked really interesting questions about programming education. I liked the historical and philosophical take on research at the Pluggable Types Reconsidered keynote.

I really enjoyed attending the Languages, Types and Formal Calculi sessions of ECOOP; the Optimization and Performance session of ISSTA; and some of the sessions of FTfJP. Many of these presentations were about research related to my work or about areas of PL that I find fascinating even though I am currently not involved with them.

Student Volunteer community at the conference was also a lot of fun to work with. I really liked how from all of us were from very diverse research backgrounds and had very different research interests. I made lots of friends and I hope to see them at future conferences!

I returned from Amsterdam with a renewed love for PL and a long reading list of amazing research from the PL community. 10/10, would recommend!