It was a memorable one-week experience as a student volunteer and attendee for ECOOP/ISSTA. My shifts were in the first two days, and my first shift was to help with the registration. There were 3 lines for people to register, and I was supposed to help with one of the experienced student volunteer. But it turned out that I was the one responsible for one line in the registration desk. It felt so overwhelming at first, I was kind of clueless as to who get the badge and who get the bag, and there were SO MANY people. As I was getting more and more familiar with the procedure, things started to get smoother. I am grateful that Ming-Ho and Alisa are always with us, ready to help with any unexpected issues or questions. One thing that made my first-day is that I met many familiar faces, some from previous conferences I attended, some I know only from pictures, but never meet in person. I greeted them and people said thank you for my service. This really made me feel happy. I learn that student volunteers are really of vital importance for the conference, and I highly recommend students to apply for volunteers.

My talks were in the last two days at ECOOP. I had quite enjoyable conversations with researchers and other students about my own and their research. Eric Ernst came to me and talked about his on-going work on equipping gbeta with more advance mechanism for conflict detection and resolution. Eric’s work on family polymorphism has great influence on my own research. He is so kind and humble and would listen carefully to my half-baked ideas. I also met other researchers who are interested in my “The Essence of Nested Composition” paper. We talked about different algorithms for distributivity rules. Their idea of normal forms of types is really interesting. I think I will take some time to think about it. In all regards, I had a good time talking to people during the week.