Dylan Beattie is a consultant, software developer and international keynote speaker. Dylan has been building data-driven web applications since the 1990s; he’s managed development teams, designed large-scale distributed systems, taught workshops on Microsoft .NET and HTTP API development, and presented keynote talks at software conferences on four continents.

Before founding Ursatile, Dylan was CTO at Skills Matter in London until they closed down in 2019. Prior to that he was webmaster, IT Manager, and eventually systems architect at Spotlight, where his first-hand experience of watching an organisation and its codebase evolve over more than a decade provided him with a unique insight into how everything from web standards and API design to Conway’s Law and recruitment ends up influencing a company’s code and culture.

Dylan grew up in southern Africa, moving to the UK with his family when he was nine. He’s a Microsoft MVP and holds a degree in Computer Science from the University of Southampton. He’s the creator of Rockstar, a programming language designed for creating computer programs that are also songs, and he’s performed his software-themed parodies of classic rock songs all over the world with The Linebreakers. He’s into skiing, scuba diving, Lego, cats, travel and photography. You’ll find him online at dylanbeattie.net and on BlueSky as @dylanbeatt.ie, and offline at meetups and rock bars all over the world, wearing a big black hat.