This was my first time attending any of ECOOP, ISSTA, or Curry On, and it was a great experience. The first 2 days all of my student volunteer shifts were all at Curry On, so I got to attend all of the morning talks, which were very interesting. Out of the Curry On talks that I did attend, the ones I found most interesting were the Web Assembly keynote, and Why VM Benchmarking is Probably Misleading you by Edd Barrett. The VM benchmarking talk was a followup to some work that I also saw presented at SPLASH 2017, so it was also neat to see how the work had evolved since then.

Other talks I found particularly interesting were the Simon Peyton Jones keynote at Curry On, and Michael Ernst’s talk on Pluggable Type Systems Reconsidered. 10/10 would recommend watching the videos if they’re available. I also liked the Types and Formal Calculi sections of the ECOOP track.

I was also attending the summer school throughout the conference. That was neat as the talks were mostly introductory level (for the most part), on some topics I’ve been meaning to look into. In particular, out of those talks I got the most out of Anders’s introduction to static analysis, and Amal’s talk about formal compiler verification. The intro talk by Simon Peyton Jones was also great.

The non-talk related parts of the conference were also great. Amsterdam is such a cool city, and what time I did get to go exploring was awesome. I wish I’d been able to stay a couple extra days to look around even more! Meeting other student volunteers and talking to researchers from all over is also one of the best parts of the conference in my mind. There’s so many cool people!

For the next conference, I’m excited to meet up with some of the people I’ve met here and catch up! Also, I feel like I was understanding more of the talks than SPLASH 2017, so hopefully at the next conference I get even more out of them. I’m also excited to be able to attend a conference without worrying about some external thing (at SPLASH I was worried about finding a PhD advisor, and at this ECOOP I had to be writing my thesis :P ). It will be nice to be able to actually hang out with the other attendees after the talks are over.

See yall at the next conference!