After a week of compelling talks, research presentations and interesting people, the conference has now come to an end. This being the first research conference for me, everything was quite a surprise to me at first. Overall, I really enjoyed the conference and learned many new things from it.

I experienced multiple cool talks concerning domain specific languages and learned about refreshing applications in this topic, both in Curry On, ISSTA and ECOOP.

It was also refreshing to listen to talks from people in industry in Curry On next to the academic talks. It was interesting to see the challenges that the industry faces in programming languages and high-scale performance and how they relate to academia.

Next to all this, the workshop ML4PL was in particular interesting for me because of my background in artificial intelligence. It was cool to learn how concepts from machine learning can be applied to problems in programming languages such as fuzzing and find out about the state of the art in this field.

Although I was not in the summerschool, I was able to experience the talk about software testing and debugging during my room shift, which introduced me to an interesting research field.

But besides all the good talks, a great aspect of the conference were the people. Through all the social events and the shifts with other volunteers, I got to know a lot of different students from all over the world. Since I am still at the start of my academic career, I found it very useful to hear the experiences of other students’ PhD programmes and their backgrounds.

Overall, I am very thankful for the opportunity to experience the conference as a student volunteer and would love to come back in the future!