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Emily Shea - "Perl Out Loud"

The Perl and Raku Conference - Greenville, SC 2026
Talks
YouTube
3 HN users recommended this talk3 months2019–2022 score 4
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN treats it as a phenomenal demonstration that voice-driven development is viable and as an eye-opener on accessibility-unfriendly coding habits.

Emily Shea, a Fastly engineer with repetitive strain injury, describes using voice dictation as her main way of programming. She covers homophones, custom vocabulary and building her own voice commands to write Perl.

“This video from the article is a phenomenal demonstration of dictation coding” (HN, 2019)

2 strong recommendations · 1 recommendations · 3 citations · 1 jokes · Talks

7 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@rkagerer Aug 2019 Strongly recommends
on HN thread What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?
Read more
Developed RSI 15 years ago, tried all kinds of contraptions. Here's what helped me: - Kinesis Advantage keyboard w/ footswitch [link] - Ambidextrous mousing (one on each side, to split the load). Favor your PageUp / PageDown buttons over the evil mousewheel. - Lifestyle changes (biggest bang for the buck). Try to get at least 20 minutes of aerobic exercise in each day, e.g. running. - Proper ergonomic positioning This video from the article is a phenomenal demonstration of dictation coding: [this video] Fun fact (or myth?): Your tongue is one of the few muscles in the body that can't get RSI. I played around prototyping a tongue-switch a while back using a flex sensor.
Phenomenal demonstration of dictation coding.
@tmtvl Sep 2022 Strongly recommends
on HN thread Short Thoughts on Computers and Programming
Yeah, when I saw Emily Shea's talk* I became aware of the accessibility-unfriendly code I normally put out. I still find myself writing bad code, but at least now I'm aware what to be aware of. * [this video]
Made the commenter aware of accessibility-unfriendly code habits.
@b2gills Jun 2021 Recommends
on HN thread Try APL
You can if you put in the work to set it up. There are two (nearly identical) talks by Emily Shea - Perl Out Loud [this video] - Voice Driven Development: Who needs a keyboard anyway? [link]
Talk showing voice-driven development is possible with setup effort.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@ksaj Dec 2019 Cites it
on HN thread Google Engineer Codes with Voice
Here's a video of someone discussing programming PERL by voice. I think I found it on HN in a different post months ago. [this video]
Someone discussing programming Perl by voice.
@lunixbochs Feb 2020 Cites it
on HN thread On Voice Coding
[this video] at 4:15 is when she plays the Perl Vista video (note the fiddling around video playing isn’t a fundamental issue with voice input, google slides with video embeds turned out to be pretty unreliable with keyboard input and I believe that was ironed out in her later talks)
Timestamp pointer to the Perl Vista video segment.
@bmn__ Feb 2020 Makes a joke
on HN thread Sherbet: An Ergonomic Gaming Keypad
cap abstract cap factory join leb cap factory leb capital letter india cap enumerable join leb capital letter tango cap data join cap type join reb reb reb slap [this video]

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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