In 2017 I went to StrangeLoop and Papers We Love was collocated. Such a great experience. I saw a talk about how type inference in OCAML worked (Hindley–Milner type inference) and I basically didn't understand any of it, but talked briefly to the presenter after.

I left so excited by both conferences and started on pulling on threads around type systems and eventually started a podcast as a result.

The podcast changed over the years, but originally it was just a way for me to investigate things I had heard of at Paper We Love and Strange Loop. As a community, PWL is a nice on-ramp into CS Theory. Thank you Zeeshan Lakhani.