Dylan Beattie: 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 Rockstar, a programming language based on the lyrics to 1980s power ballads. The joke was supposed to end there: a single Markdown file that folks would read, maybe laugh a bit, and then get on with their lives… well, that’s not quite how it worked out.

The internet’s a big place, and a little corner of it took Rockstar to their hearts: they found it, they loved it - and then they implemented it. Six years on, Rockstar has shown up in the most unlikely places, from Classic Rock magazine, to Advent of Code, to Carnegie Mellon University and MIT - and each time, it attracts a new wave of aspiring Rockstar developers, with questions about how it works, and suggestions about how to make it better. And so, one evening in 2024, Dylan sat down in another bar, opened another laptop, and wrote another joke: “Rockstar 2.0: The Difficult Second Album”.

On one level, Rockstar in 2024 is a stupid joke language based on Bon Jovi songs. On another level, it’s packed with things that would have been impossible even just a few years ago: a project that combines .NET, C#, JavaScript, browser APIs, and web assembly, building on decades of research in parser engineering and asynchronous application development. And yes, 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, from INTERCAL, to Piet, to the researcher who taught Perl to speak Latin. You’ll learn what’s involved in creating an entirely new programming language. You’ll see a lot of cool tech, you’ll marvel at just how much engineering can go into one joke, and who knows - you might even qualify as a Certified Rockstar 2.0 Developer.

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 Bluesky as @dylanbeatt.ie, and offline at meetups and rock bars all over the world, wearing a big black hat.