The author attended the SIGIR22 conference, which was held as a hybrid event with both in-person and virtual components. The author found the in-person sessions to be highly engaging and productive, particularly the Short Paper and Demo Sessions, where they had opportunities to meet topic experts and learn about new topics. However, they noted that the remote talks did not quite match the quality of their in-person counterparts. The conference also featured an industry track, which was well-represented by companies such as Yext and e-commerce vendors. The author was impressed by the sponsors' booths, particularly Bloomberg's, which showcased their analytics system hands-on. They also had opportunities to learn about recent advances in dense retrieval methods and the future of sparse retrieval, with a panel discussion suggesting that sparse retrieval may be the way forward. Additionally, the author highlighted the importance of open-source frameworks and tools, such as Haystack, which enables anyone to build powerful NLP pipelines for search use cases. Overall, the conference was found to be highly engaging and informative, with opportunities for networking and learning from both researchers and industry professionals.