A few weeks ago, I attended the Oregon Programming Languages Summer School (OPLSS) at Boston University. In lieu of giving a full testimonial (I sort-of live-tweeted here here, if you’re interested in that), what follows is a brief, more-curated (but still largely unorganized) collection of thoughts about the experience. I had originally hoped to get this post out only a few days after it ended while everything was still fresh, but, well, things happened (we’ll get there).

First and foremost, I really enjoyed OPLSS ‘24 and strongly recommend it to anyone on the fence. I expect this post to come across a bit negative just because I have more words to say in that direction, but I don’t regret attending at all, and would (and possibly will!) gladly go again. I had a ton of fun, learned a lot, and met some awesome people, which was all I really wanted from the experience.

Lecture

Coming into OPLSS, I was told by basically everybody that the lecture material was possibly the least important part of the experience. I think this advice is correct, but also not very actionable as a first-time attendee. At least, I found that I was pretty bad at judging whether a lecture series would be interesting from the website description or even the first class – in pretty much every case, the ramp from day 1 to day 2 was crazy, and I would get lost if I let myself think “yeah I’ve seen this already” and zoned out.

In hindsight, my favorite lectures were Ahmed’s series on logical relations (I hear this is always a hit) and Zdacewic’s series on embedding monadic DSLs in Coq. In both cases, I had some prior familiarity with the big picture, but the specific technical insights were useful all the same. There was a good spread of technical (with Greek letters on the whiteboard) and non-technical material, enough to melt my brain without actually losing me if I was actually paying attention (more on that later).

Location

This year, OPLSS was, in contrast to the name, hosted in Boston, MA instead of Eugene, OR. I heard no shortage of testimonials that the vibe this year was different than usual, something that I cannot confirm for myself as this is the first time I’ve attended. While I can only speculate, my guess is that, as Boston is a city with lots of things to do besides sitting in the dorm doing type theory homework (no offense to Eugene!), the student population naturally ended up splitting up to do things with pre-established friends rather than sitting around getting drunk.

Not that I would know what people ended up doing – I live in the Boston area anyway, so I wasn’t staying in the dorms and wasn’t particularly interested in doing tourism anyway. Being local was definitely a double-edged sword here; I got to save my advisor some money on my dorms and didn’t need to deal with travel and all that, but it also meant that I missed out on whatever late-night homework sessions and roommate icebreaking may have gone on. This almost certainly contributed to my making fewer friends than I would have in a more typical year.

Burnout

Coming into the week, I had ambitions of taking details notes for every lecture series, possibly even live-TeXing it. This motivation lasted maybe through Wednesday morning, when I realized that I was just writing symbols into my notebook without listening to the words Pfenning was saying and I was totally lost. Historically, I’m pretty useless until 11AM on most days, so waking up at 7:45 and commuting to a very technical 9 AM lecture wasn’t doing my energy levels any favors. Things would probably have been better if I was in the dorms, but I can’t imagine it would have made that much of a difference. On Friday, I overslept my alarm and missed the first session entirely, so I took the hint from my body and skipped session 2 as well, coming in after lunch.

If I have any advice to future OPLSS attendees, it’s to very aggressively prune which lectures you attend, and to make sure to take some time to yourself to unwind and just be away from the lecture hall. This doesn’t even need to be literal relaxation time, I spent some time in a side classroom working on the mechanisation of Amal’s proof, it’s just important to move away from “forced” material.