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Emily Shea - "Perl Out Loud"

The Perl and Raku Conference - Greenville, SC 2026 · 32.8K views · 2019-06-18 · 51:11

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

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

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2019–2022

Topics

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

What people said

tmtvl · 2022-09 · Strong recommendation

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. * [VIDEO]

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rkagerer · 2019-08 · Strong recommendation

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: [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.

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b2gills · 2021-06 · Recommendation

You can if you put in the work to set it up. There are two (nearly identical) talks by Emily Shea - Perl Out Loud [VIDEO] - Voice Driven Development: Who needs a keyboard anyway? [LINK]

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Sources

Video by The Perl and Raku Conference - Greenville, SC 2026, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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