I very much enjoyed attending ISSTA/ECOOP this year. I gave my talk on “Evaluating Test-Suite Reduction in Real Software Evolution” on the first day (hopefully I taught everyone something interesting about test-suite reduction), and then after that, I was able to just enjoy the conference. Compared to previous conferences I’ve attended, ISSTA/ECOOP was rather small, which I felt was better as I could more easily approach and talk to people. I also could go to any talk I wanted, since all the talks are in one track. Aside from ISSTA/ECOOP, I was also pleased to attend several of the very interesting talks and keynotes from Curry On.

I was also in the summer school. What I enjoyed most from the summer school was how I could interact with several mentors at the mentoring breakfasts. It was very enjoyable to meet new people whom I would normally not be able to talk to and just chat about my and their research interests as well as receive great advice about a future in an academic career. Furthermore, the lectures provided at the summer school were quite good a teaching general topics I had not experienced before, such as verifying compilers; I got to learn what are some of the open problems in these areas I had never thought about before.

One event at ECOOP that I personally enjoyed was the static analysis tool hackathon. I was particularly interested in using DOOP for one of my research projects, and I was able to just go to the hackathon and get help from Yannis Smaragdakis and his students, the developers of DOOP, to help me get started with using DOOP. I would recommend such an event and would look forward to more such events at future conferences.

Overall, I really enjoyed attending ISSTA/ECOOP this year. Hopefully, I will be able to attend future editions as well!