The ECOOP summer school gave me an opportunity to meet face-to-face with Simon Peyton Jones at Microsoft Research. That discussion ended with a project idea that would involve improving Haskell’s inlining decisions with neural networks—my description of a dream project—and an offer to serve as my contact in industry for help with it. In the same mentor/mentee breakfast series, I made a connection with professor Karim Ali at the University of Alberta, working on a similar project, who offered his contact information. The problem I will be working on is rather specific; and I somehow managed to speak with a number of other researchers who had published related work for it, all in the same place, in the span of one week. This conference may have changed the course of my PhD.