New Zealand chocolate is the inverse of Swiss chocolate

Ahh, OOPSLA. The week in October where I stop sleeping and eating.

Today is day two of my personal OOPSLA, but it's actually two days before the technical programme starts. I'm the Student Volunteers Chair this year, so most of my work comes early in the conference. Yesterday, I had about 20 students helping me get the registration materials ready for attendees, and then handing out the registration materials in the afternoon. Today, it's more registration, plus the tutorials and workshops started today. We do most of the tutorials/workshops before the conference begins so that attendees don't have to choose between attending the tutorials/workshops and attending the technical programme.

The thing that I love about making the Student Volunteers programme happen is giving students from around the world the opportunity to meet each other and meet the top minds in this particular piece of computer science. I have a small army of students who help me make this conference happen. My students come from universities in New Zealand, France, the UK, Germany, Italy, China, Brasil, Russia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, South Korea, Israel, Slovenia, Mexico, and the US. Even my US students come from all corners of the country: Oregon (these are my local students), Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia, Tennessee, Nebraska, Maryland, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, North Carolina, Michigan, Georgia, and California. 16 countries, and 14 American states. That's pretty nifty.

And my students are just fantastic this year. Several of them are presenting technical content during the conference: papers, posters, workshops. I'm immensely proud of them.

I might blog from OOPSLA later in the week. I caught a quiet few minutes now, so thought that I would just publicly say how much my students rock. This is especially true for the student who brought me chocolate from New Zealand (which is what prompted someone else to make the comment that is the title of this blog).