Day 10 – How to give a Raku talk at TPRC – and why you should

My goal for this post is to convince you – yes, you, current reader – that you both can and should present a talk about Raku for The Perl & Raku Conference this year. Statistically, I’m assuming that you’re not currently planning to give a Raku talk, so I’ve got my work cut out for me. But I’m confident that I can change your mind.

First, I’d like to persuade you that you’re capable of giving a Raku talk. After that, we’ll get into why you should. So, what does it take to present a Raku talk at TPRC?

How to give a Raku talk at TPRC

In brief, to give a TPRC talk, all you need to do is: pick a topic, submit your talk proposal, prepare your talk, attend TPRC, and present your talk. But let’s be less brief and break that down, step by step.

Step 0: Pick a topic

In my experience, this step is the biggest hurdle for most people. “Sure”, you might think, “if I had redesigned Raku’s dispatch system, done something crazy with Raku’s slangs or could teach Raku best practices based on years of experience, then I’d have a good topic for a Raku talk. But I haven’t, so I don’t.”

No so. Sure, tales of advanced Raku hacking can make for nice conference talks. But so can the perspective of someone who just learned Raku and can talk about their first impressions of the language – after all, we all want Raku to be approachable to newcomers and to present a good first impression. Everyone working on the language and documentation tries to imagine ourselves as new users, but if you actually are a new user, then your perspective on Raku is instantly valuable.

In fact, I’m prepared to argue that you have something worth sharing with other Rakoons regardless of your experience level with Raku. To prove it to you, here’s a list of potential talk titles, suitable for anyone from the newest Rakoon to the most grizzled of old timers:

• I didn’t know Raku before writing this talk: Raku first impressions
• Learning Raku as my first programming language
• Coming to Raku from JavaScript [or whatever other language you came from]
• Lessons for Raku from functional [or Object-Oriented, or statically typed] programming languages
• A new Rakoon’s perspective on the Raku documentation
• What I learned writing my first Raku CLI script
• My favorite Raku features and why they’re awesome
• What I wish I knew then: lessons from my first 10 Raku scripts
• How to explain Raku’s strengths to Python [or other language] programmers
• Why I failed to release a Raku module
• Lessons from writing my first Raku module
• My new Raku module is neat and you should use it
• Raku documentation: a contributor’s perspective
• How to use this cool but complicated Raku module: a user’s perspective
• Beginner compiler hacking: my first contributions to Rakudo
• This Raku feature is cool and underappreciated – here’s how to use it in your code
• Combine these Raku features for even more expressive code
• Level up your compiler hacking by venturing into NQP
• Raku best practices (or, my coding conventions and why I wish you’d follow them)
• How to use this cool but complicated Raku module: the maintainer’s perspective
• Writing high-performance Raku code: what I’ve learned
• Performance improvements to Rakudo: what I’ve done
• I’m literally Larry Wall: State of the Butterfly 2025

Please help yourself to any of those ideas – even if this post is the very first you’ve heard of Raku, I bet you could take at least one.

But here’s the real take away: regardless of your experience level, you’ve likely done something Raku related recently – and sharing how that went would make a great Raku talk. Even – especially! – if the answer to “how that went” is “not great” and you have criticisms of Raku or suggestions for how to prevent your not-great-experience for the next Rakoon.

Step 1: Submit your talk

Once you have a topic, the next step is to submit it on PaperCall. Note that this step comes before writing your talk – all you need is a title and a very brief (300 characters) talk description. So don’t wait; submit your talk as soon as you have the idea!

You’ll also need to decide which length to request for your talk: 20 minutes or 50 minutes (each of which includes both your talk and Q&A after your talk). That’s something that only you can judge based on your topic and how much you have to say about it.

But if you’re on the fence, here’s my advice: Go for the longer talk. The Q&A is often the best part and, besides, sometimes tales grow in the telling and you discover that you have more to say than you thought. Better to have a 50 minute slot with 25 minutes for questions than a 20 minute one with negative 5.

After submitting your talk, you should hear back from conference organizers fairly soon. In general, the organizers make every effort to include as many talks as possible, so I wouldn’t be too nervous about whether your talk will be accepted.

Step 2: Write your talk

Okay, on to actually writing your talk. First, let’s talk format.

For most presenters, writing a talk often means making a slide deck, but it doesn’t need to – never forget that just talking to your audience is a perfectly valid option. If you decide to make slides, you can do so with LibreOffice Impress, Keynote, Google Slides, or any presentation software of your choice. Or, if you prefer to live in the terminal, lookatme or slides are fine too.

My main advice is not to overthink it. It’s tempting – trust me, I know. You’re talking to someone who once wrote a presentation by first building a Raku→HTML preprocessor, using that HTML to generate slides with Reveal.js, and then got distracted adding new features to Reveal.js. And, you know what? It wasn’t worth it. Lately, I’ve been making pretty basic slides with Impress and I doubt anyone cares one way or the other.

(Tip: if, like me, you’re tempted to do something fancy to have properly highlighted Raku code in your slides, remember that there’s nothing wrong with using screenshots of highlighted code instead – once it’s on the slide, it’ll look just the same.)

Now, on to the actual content – a realm where the “don’t overthink it” advice applies at least as strongly. If you’ve followed my advice so far, you’ve got something to say about the topic you picked (like reporting how your recent Raku experiences went). So just say that. Plan to be conversational; explain your topic just like you were talking to a friend. You don’t need to try to sound smart; you don’t need to avoid criticizing Raku or the Raku community. (Though you do need to avoid personal attacks, deadnaming, explicit images, racist language, or anything else that violates the Raku Code of Conduct. Rakoons are serious about making sure Raku talks are -Ofun for everyone and we take CoC enforcement seriously.)

In general, remember that you’re writing a talk for a friendly audience of other Rakoons; explain things to them like you’d explain to a group of friends and you’ll be well on your way to having a great talk.

Even though this step is titled “write your talk”, there’s one more task after you’ve written your slides or other talk materials – practice! This step is technically optional, but strongly strongly recommended. I recommend running through your full talk at least twice – more is better, of course.

And, if at all possible, at least one run-through should have an audience who hasn’t heard the talk before. This person doesn’t need to be able to follow the details of the talk (non-Rakoons/non programmers are fine!) and could be watching over a video call instead of in person – the point is just to trigger that part of your brain that recognizes when you’re being watched and ensure you’ve had that experience for this talk before you get to TPRC.

The benefits of rehearsing with an audience might sound trivial, but it genuinely makes a tremendous difference. In fact, I believe in the power of that sort of rehearsal so much that I’d be happy to be your live audience. If you don’t have anyone else to practice your talk in front of, send me an email and we’ll set up a video call.

With at least a couple of rehearsals under your belt, you’re almost ready to give your talk.

Step 3: Attend TPRC

But first you have to actually get to the conference. For many of you, this could be the biggest hurdle and the one where I can offer the least useful advice.

This year, The Perl & Raku Conference will be in Greenville, South Carolina (USA). The Raku community is global – perhaps a consequence of our best-in-class Unicode support – and I recognize that some of you are on the other side of an ocean from Greenville.

If that describes you, then I understand if attending TPRC (which, at least this year, is an absolute requirement for presenting a talk) comes at too high a cost, in money or time. Even for people who don’t have an ocean between them and Greenville, the logistics of getting there can be a challenge.

But I’ll offer a few facts that might help. First, remember that – since you’re giving a talk – your conference ticket will be free, which could help keep the total costs down even with travel costs. If air travel is in your budget, you should look into flights for multiple airports. In addition to flying directly to Greenville, you can also fly to Atlanta, Georgia (about 2.5 hours away). The benefit of flying into Atlanta is that its airport happens to be the US airport with the absolute most connections – that is, the most cities that you can fly directly from. This not only simplifies flight logistics but can also (sometimes!) significantly reduce the total cost.

If flying isn’t in your budget, I’d also encourage you to consider driving from a longer distance than you might otherwise. Speaking personally, I’ll mention that previously drove about 14 hours for a TPRC – and attending more than justified that drive. Plus, if you can extend your trip a bit, the area around Greenville is a great spot to spend a bit of time in the outdoors.

Finally, if you just can’t make it to Greenville but would otherwise want to give a conference talk, please consider recording a talk for YouTube instead. True, there’s not a way to remotely present a recorded talk at TPRC, but there’s still a lot of value in preparing and presenting a talk. If you go this route, please let me know and I’ll do my best to ensure that your recorded talk gets the attention it deserves – maybe it could even be linked to from the conference-talk playlist (though I can’t personally guarantee that).

Step 4: Present your talk & take questions

Once you’re in Greenville, the only thing that’s left is to give your talk. If you’ve followed my advice so far, this step should be the easiest one of all. All you need to do is to deliver your talk exactly the way you’ve rehearsed it. I recognize that some people have anxieties around public speaking, but the good news is that TPRC is about the friendliest audience you could possibly have: everyone there is guaranteed to be interested in your topic and is rooting for you to succeed. In my experience presenting at various venues, the audience for Raku talks at TPRC is pretty much a best case scenario.

When it comes to Q&A, there’s equally little to be worried about. Yes, you may get some questions that you’re not expecting and don’t know how to answer – but it’s 100% okay to say so. No one will be interested in gotcha moments or exposing some mistake; they’ll just be asking out of genuine curiosity. Many times, the questions can spark genuinely interesting conversations, so just treat each question as the potential beginning to a conversation among friends and everything will go great. In fact, that gets to the biggest piece of advice I have for the presentation as a whole – approach the whole thing as a conversation and you’ll be on the correct (and low-stress!) path.

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So, there you have it: come up with a topic, submit your proposal, prepare your talk, attend TPRC, and present your talk. There’s really no reason why you – yes, you! – can’t present a Raku talk at TPRC.

Why

That just leaves one question: given that you can present a talk, should you?

Yes. Yes, you should give a Raku talk at TPRC. Why? Because it will benefit you and because it will benefit the Raku community as a whole. Here’s how.

Good for you

Giving a Raku talk will make you better off in three main ways: you’ll learn from it, you’ll have fun, and you’ll connect with other Rakoons. Let’s discuss each of those in turn.

First, you’ll learn a ton from presenting your Raku talk. Trust me, no matter how well you think that you understand a topic, you’ll never truly master it until you’re able to explain it to others, exactly what you’re doing when you prepare and deliver a TPRC talk. Even before you arrive, the simple act of writing your presentation will force you to think through the topic from the perspective of your audience – that is, from the perspective of people who lack your particular expertise (even if that “expertise” is your unique perspective as a beginner in Raku!).

Moreover, remember what I said about the Q&A being conversational? You’ll also learn from the questions and feedback you get from your talk. In the vast majority of cases, these conversations won’t be limited to the formal Q&A period; as you interact with other Rakoons at the conference, they’ll continue to discuss your talk – and these conversations can be incredibly educational.

After all, the Raku community is small enough that (unless you’re incredibly lucky!), the conference is probably the only place where you can have face-to-face conversations with other programmers who are just as interested in Raku as you are. It’s entirely possible that you’ll leave the conference with ideas for your next Raku project or new techniques that improve your Raku code.

(Note that I’m passing over all the ways that you’ll learn from the other Raku talks and from discussing them with fellow attendees since these benefits depend on attending TPRC and not specifically on presenting a talk. But, for the record, just attending is a tremendous learning opportunity too and well worth it even if you ignore my advice about giving a talk.)

Next, presenting a talk is just plain fun. As I’ve mentioned a few times, the Raku community is pretty awesome (or, to use the Raku terminology, “optimized for fun” aka -Ofun); getting to hang out with fellow Rakoons – people who are typically weird in the same ways anyone who has read this far most likely is – is a real treat. That’s true as a conference attendee, too. But it’s doubly true as a presenter, since your conference talk provides a built-in conversation topic with anyone who saw your talk; the perfect ice breaker.

Talking about how much fun the conference can be might sound like a momentary benefit, but it’s really not. From personal experience, the enjoyable conversations you’ll have at TPRC – about your talk, about other talks, or just about Raku in general – can provide incredible motivation for future Raku hacking. And that motivation lasts far past the end of the conference itself.

Finally, giving a Raku talk is a great way to integrate into the Raku community. Much of coding is inherently a solo activity – for all that pull requests, collaborative coding, and code reviews bring other people in, the actual writing of code is something you do alone. Of course, we Rakoons share our work, whether that’s via GitHub, r/rakulang, the #raku IRC channel, or any of the other online spaces we inhabit. But there’s really no substitute for face-to-face meetings; for the chance to put a real-life person to the usernames and project maintainers you’ve interacted with online.

This flows in both directions – at the same time you’re meeting people, they’re meeting you too. And you benefit from both knowing and being known; in either direction, all future interactions will be colored by having met, by mutually seeing each other as three-dimensional human beings rather than flat online avatars.

And while this benefit is most dramatic for the people you meet at the conference, it’s not at all limited to them. As I mentioned, your talk will be posted to YouTube and thus will be seen by many Rakoons who aren’t able to attend TPRC. Obviously, you won’t be able to meet these Rakoons, but they’ll still get to see you as a person, not just a name. You’ll benefit from that parasocial bond in each future interaction with the community as a whole – and maybe even from the higher profile that comes from being not just a member of the community but a meaningful part of the conversation.

Bottom line: presenting a Raku talk will be good for you in the short-term (it’s fun and you’ll learn a ton); in the medium term (you’ll be motivated to put what you’ve learned into practice and will have an easier time working with others as you do so); and in the long term (you’ll play a larger role in the Raku community and have a higher profile in our community).

Good for Raku

The personal benefits to you come paired with benefits to the Raku community as a whole – something I’m guessing you care at least a little bit about if you’ve read this far.

Most obviously, other Rakoons will get to hear your unique perspective and the actual content of your talk. Just as you learn from us, we’ll learn from you. Similarly, conversations with you will motivate us, too. And we all benefit from seeing each other as real people rather than avatars. More broadly, if you’re interested enough in Raku to give a conference talk, you’re -Ofun too and we’ll all be better off for your decision to present a talk.

Further, you’ll help Raku in a way that goes beyond existing Rakoons. When your talk is posted online, it will be visible to the Raku-curious as well and will play a real part in raising Raku’s overall profile. I know that some of my first exposure to Raku came from watching conference talks about the language and I’m sure that I’m far from alone. Putting your own ¢2 out there could be exactly what convinces someone to check out the language; each talk we post plays a real role in growing the community around the language we all love.

Fin

So, there you have it. You can give a Raku talk. You should give a Raku talk. Sign up today!