Yak Shaving for Presenters: Introducing App::SlideServer – Michael Conrad – TPRC 2023

#perl #tprc #slideshow

In my last two YAPC talks (OpenGL and WebSockets), I put some real effort into the slide show software. I posted the source code for those, but this year I’ve finally refined the API and packaged it for CPAN. Now everyone can give fancy websocket slide shows! I also show how to deploy it on Docker.

“and a factory in Chicago that makes miniature models … of factories”.
Over the last five years, I’ve given a few talks (two for TPC) where I use Mojolicious to serve a websocket-enabled web app that gives everyone their own local copy of the slides and synchronizes with the copy I’m presenting. I think I’ve refined the design enough to be a compelling choice for anyone giving a presentation. I will show how you can take a very simple Markdown file and turn it into a synchronized slide show with two shell commands, customize it to whatever degree you like, and deploy it on a server as a docker container with a few more commands. There are several other slide systems like this to choose from, but I think I’ve found a particularly powerful combination of “simple” and “extensible”, and it’s written in Perl! (and javascript)