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THE VIDEO SHELF · voice programming

Emily Shea - "Perl Out Loud"

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.

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Why HN readers recommended it

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

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel
The Perl and Raku Conference - Greenville, SC 2026
Topic
voice programming
Format
talk
Level
general
HN recommenders in dataset
3
HN mentions in dataset
7
Recommendation years in dataset
2019–2022

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

  • 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 …

    rkagerer on Hacker News · 2019-08
    In What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?

  • 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]

    tmtvl on Hacker News · 2022-09
    In Short Thoughts on Computers and Programming

  • 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]

    b2gills on Hacker News · 2021-06
    In Try APL

Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.

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