[Pdx-pm] Lightning Talks!

[Joshua Keroes]

The next technical meeting won't have just one speaker, it will have
AS MANY AS POSSIBLE. (That sounds best when spoken in a boomy,
echoing voice)

Lightning Talks
Wed 12 Feb 2003, 6-8PM

Q: What is a lightning talk?

A: Any Perlish or geekish lecture, rant, speech, poem, droll
   witticism, or [hopefully] constructive criticism that you can fit
   into EIGHT MINUTES.


Q: Who talks?

A: You do!


Q: Why would you want to do this?

A: [Copied from http://perl.plover.com/lt/ 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?

A: Why not take a look at prior lightning talks?

   A sampling:

   # How OOP is like Japanese food - Sean Burke
   # Examining Fossilized Code - Uri Guttman
   # Lies We Tell Ourselves About Perl - Walt Mankowski
   # CGI::Application, A Framework for Web Applications - William R. Rico
   # "Design Patterns" Aren't - Mark-Jason Dominus
   # CPAN is Unusable - David W. Crawford
   # Five Steps to Better Perl - Adam Turoff

   ...and you may remember this one from a prior portland.pm meeting:

   # On Beyond Perl V (if Dr. Seuss were a Perl 6 hacker) - Allison Randal