About Lightning Talks
Q: What is a lightning talk?
Any Perlish or geekish lecture, rant, speech, poem, droll witticism, or (hopefully) constructive criticism that you can fit into N MINUTES (where N usually equals 5, 8, 10 or 15).
Q: Who talks?
You do!
Q: Why would you want to do this?
(Copied from Perl Paraphernalia verbatim; minor edits)
Maybe you've never given a talk before, and you'd like to start small. For a Lightning Talk, you don't need to make slides, and if you do decide to make slides, you only need to make four.
Maybe you're nervous and you're afraid you'll mess up. It's a lot easier to plan and deliver a eight minute talk than it is to deliver a long talk. And if you do mess up, at least the painful part will be over quickly.
Maybe you don't have much to say. Maybe you just want to ask a question, or invite people to help you with your project, or boast about something you did, or tell a short cautionary story. These things are all interesting and worth talking about, but there might not be enough to say about them to fill up thirty minutes.
Maybe you have a lot of things to say, and you're already going to give a long talk on one of them, and you don't want to hog the spotlight. There's nothing wrong with giving several Lightning Talks. Hey, they're only eight minutes.
Q: What do I talk about?
Why not take a look at prior lightning talks? A sampling:
Here's a list of the talks from last time we did this:
- Allison Randal - On her upcoming book, Perl 6 Essentials
- Annett Sullivan - Perl and Water Quality (with GD animations!)
- Jeff Zucker - Everything is database. Nothing is database
- Josh Heumann - Perljxta, an implementation of Sun's JXTA P2P protocols
- Michael G. Schwern - MakeMaker Is Doomed
- Brian Ingerson - Two Tails of OOP Adventures in Data-Driven Design
- Brian Ingerson - Lightn-ingy Strikes Twice
- Ben Marcotte - From the Dark Side Back to the Light How having to use Win32::TieRegistry led to experimenting with "hierarchical" hashes
- Clint Moore - Experiences Gained From Working Alone on a Large Project
There are even more examples at Perl Paraphernalia.
Q: I still have questions! Mark-Jason probably answers your question on Perl Paraphernalia's "Lightning Talks" page.
