Emily Shea - "Perl Out Loud"
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.
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.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2019 to 2022.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec rkagerer · 2019-08 · on “What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?”
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.
Strong rec tmtvl · 2022-09 · on “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]
Recommends b2gills · 2021-06 · on “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]
Cites tigerlily · 2019-08 · on “Open-Source Code for Hand Gesture Recognition – Sign Language Translation”
Ha, I read the headline and thought it was "git by gesture". This is because I'd recently watched "Perl out loud", a talk this year by Emily Shea (2shea): [this video]
Cites ksaj · 2019-12 · on “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]
Cites lunixbochs · 2020-02 · on “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)