Abstract
Some talks carefully guide the listeners through the entirety of a topic, starting with the basics and ending with the fine details.
That’s… not the plan for this talk.
Instead, we’re going to see the highlight reel of a bunch of topics that caught my interest over the course of the year: a review of cool (and uncool) changes in Perl, the best modules you’re not using, stupid optimization tricks, tools for handling catastrophic program failure, git scripts you’ll become dependent on, numbers stations, Zork, productivity tools, and who knows what else.
I will stand in place and let lightning talks strike over and over, until I am reduced to cinders.
You get to witness the ordeal, and you might just learn a thing or two.
Notes
I’ve always enjoyed giving a lightning talk. You only need to hold the audience’s attention for a little bit, you’re not expected to grant any deep insight, and you can get away with the whole thing being a one-gag presentation. Doing almost 90 minutes of lightning talks in a row changes the math on that. You need to keep the audience’s attention (although if you lose it for a while, they’re not losing context). The “if it’s bad, everybody can move on” aspect works, but that still means you need most of the talks to be good. Also, you can probably get away with going a bit over time once in a while, but it’s cheating to put an eight minute talk in the middle.
I think I should probably do this one again sometime.