Joachim Breitner's Homepage

ICFP 2019 in Berlin ended yesterday, and it was – as always – a great pleasure. This year was particularly noteworthy for the quite affordable conference hotel and the absolutely amazing food during the coffee breaks.

Since I am no longer a proper academic, I unsurprisingly did not have real research to present. Luckily I found ways to not just be a passive participant this year:

• At FARM, I presented Kaleidogen, a small game (or toy, some would say) of mine. The room was packed with people, so thanks for all your interest! If you missed it, you can soon see the recording or read the demo abstract.

• At PLMW, the mentoring workshop for young researchers, I ran the “Social event” together with Niki Vazou. Like last year, we randomly grouped the students and held a little competition where they had to match program listings to languages and algorithms. This was great fun, and we even managed to solve the sudden problem of two ties in a ad-hoc extra quiz.

• During his “State of GHC” speech, Simon Peyton Jones asked me to speak about the GHC Proposal Process for a few slides.

• And since that is not enough stage time, I secured two spots in local stand-up comedy open mics on Monday and Friday, and even dragged sizable crowds of ICFP participants to these venues. One was a boat, and the other one a pretty dodgy bar in Neukölln, so that alone was a memorable experience. And the host was visibly surprised when his joke “I couldn’t be a software developers – I can’t commit” was met by such a roaring response…

Anyways, ICFP is over, back to disappear in the churn of every day work, and I hope to see you all next year.