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Emily Shea - "Perl Out Loud"

The Perl and Raku Conference - Greenville, SC 2026 · talk · Watch on YouTube

Python, Ruby & scripting languagesTesting, debugging & developer toolsSoftware practice, open source & careers

What it is

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.

Why Hacker News recommends it

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

  • 3 people recommended it
  • 3 different months
  • 2 strong recommendations
  • first 2019, last 2022

What HN commenters said

  1. “This video from the article is a phenomenal demonstration of dictation coding”

    Phenomenal demonstration of dictation coding.

    rkagerer, 2019-08 · Strong recommendation · in “What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?”

  2. “when I saw Emily Shea's talk* I became aware of the accessibility-unfriendly code I normally put out”

    Made the commenter aware of accessibility-unfriendly code habits.

    tmtvl, 2022-09 · Strong recommendation · in “Short Thoughts on Computers and Programming”

  3. “You can if you put in the work to set it up.”

    Talk showing voice-driven development is possible with setup effort.

    b2gills, 2021-06 · Recommendation · in “Try APL”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: voice coding, rsi, accessibility, perl, dictation

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