I submitted a Tyde '24 Paper

Well, there we go. Just shy of four years after I started my PhD, I’ve finally submitted a research paper to a workshop. In this case: “The Workshop on Type-Driven Development” – abbreviated TyDe – 2024. Papers aren’t a requirement for passing your PhD here (and I know several successful people who never did as part of their PhD), but it still feels good to at least have submitted something (I’m so not counting my chickens yet!). The title of it is “Type-level Property Based Testing”.

It’s always interesting to go through the motions yourself, having heard from others what it is like. I was convinced I could have it all ready one month before the submission deadline. In reality, it ended up being closer to 5 days before (which apparently is really good, I’m told the day before is horrifyingly normal). I would love to write more about it, if my brain doesn’t immediately repress it due to the past week of stress, but I’m currently slightly tired of writing… ^^;;

Also, past me turned out to be a turned out to be a huge help! I keep a series of PhD notebooks of technical considerations, paper summaries, miscellaneous ramblings, etc. As part of that, about a year ago, I took care to keep a log of all the tricks and challenges involved with implementing what I ended up writing about. All the challenges and considerations were there (albeit in note form) and I “just” needed to transfer them into formal writing. Thanks past me!!

Of course, my supervisor was also a great help. The initial version was 1½ pages over the 12 page limit; 3 columns too many. But like many things, experience is helpful, and so Edwin managed to regain those columns by “simply” rewording things (and cutting some excessive details I didn’t know were excessive). This was a massive help, and I would not have been able to submit without it.

After a tiny amount of confusion, I have now received confirmation that the paper is not meant to be anonymous or double-blind or anything like that, hence this blog post, where you’ll also find the paper itself (the PDF should be linked at the top of this page). We’re not entirely happy with the title, but it was the best we could come up with (and naming is infamously one of the 2 hardest Computer Science problems, so I’m glad we have a title at all ^^). I will update the paper once the review process has happened. Oh also, although it’s slightly distracting, I think I have to put this somewhere: the PDF is a personal copy for personal use only, not redistribution, it is pre-everything, including peer review.

Regardless of whether you read or understand any of it, I hope you at least enjoyed this tiny random blurb : )

I would like to do a more comprehensive discussion/walkthrough/tutorial about how and what I did in the paper, but apparently that’s called a “Thesis Chapter” and “something I really should be working on right now”. (Oh yeah, this is also why the graph has been flat for the past while. I’m really looking forward to the jump once I add this in!).

Anyway, I’m off to EMF tomorrow – the timing worked out so well – which I’m looking forward to tremendously (5 years I’ve wanted to go to that! *shakes fist at COVID*). It’ll also be the only tiny amount of summer holiday I get this year, but such is writing up it seems. Thanks again for reading, bye for now : )

Acknowledgements

• Edwin Brady, without whom none of this would have been possible.
• Micah J. Smith, whose blog post on various acmart settings got the document into its postable format.