Lightning Talks To Remember

By Beshr Kayali | February 8, 2012 | Section: Lists |

A History Lesson

Lightning Talks first appeared at PyCon (Python Conference) in 1997, at that point it was just called "Short Talks". The name "Lightning Talks" was first coined by Mark Jason Dominus, one of the leading Perl developers, for a similar session at Yet Another Perl Conference (YAPC) in 2000.

Lightning Talks gradually became a meme at tech conferences and events, with varying formats according to venues, and time-slots usually between 30 and 90 minutes for the session.

To make a Lightning Talks session exciting and rapid, the length of each talk is usually 5 minutes (varies between 1 and 10 minutes).

Five Minutes Only?

You might think that 5 minutes are too short for a talk, so here's a good list of suggestions for things you can talk about, taken as-is from here:

- Why my favorite module / add-on package is X
- I want to do cool project X. Does anyone want to help?
- Successful Project: I did project X. It was a success. Here's how you could benefit
- Failed Project: I did project X. It was a failure, and here's why
- Heresy: People always say X, but they're wrong. Here's why
- You All Suck: Here's what is wrong with our community
- Call to Action: Let's all do more of X / less of X
- A Funny Thing happened to me on the Way to the Mailing List / Newsgroup / Web Forum
- Wouldn't it be cool if X?
- Someone needs to do X
- Wish List
- Why X was a mistake
- Why X looks like a mistake, but isn't
- What it's like to do X
- Here's a useful technique that worked
- Here's a technique I thought would be useful but didn't work
- Why add-on package X sucks
- Comparison of similar add-on packages X and Y
- Why we should be paying more attention to X
- My Favorite Feature