Dylan Beattie

Dylan Beattie

Software engineer, speaker, musician and creator of Rockstar

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.

How To Be a Rockstar Developer

One evening in 2018, Dylan Beattie sat down in a bar, opened a laptop, and wrote a joke: a parody specification for a programming language based on 1980s rock songs. Seven years later, Rockstar has shown up everywhere from Classic Rock magazine to Carnegie Mellon University, and each time, it attracts a new wave of aspiring Rockstar developers, with ideas, questions and suggestions… and so one evening in 2024, Dylan sat down in another bar, opened another laptop, and Rockstar 2.0 was born. It’s a project which combines C#, JavaScript, browser APIs, and web assembly, building on decades of research in parser engineering and asynchronous application development — and it’s still based on Bon Jovi songs.

This is the story of Rockstar 2.0. You’ll learn about the history of esoteric programming languages, and what’s involved in creating an entirely new programming language. You’ll see a lot of cool tech… and you’ll marvel at just how much engineering can go into one joke.