Dylan Beattie
Creator of the Rockstar programming language
London, United Kingdom
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Dylan Beattie is an independent consultant who has been building data-driven web applications since the 1990s. He’s managed teams, taught workshops, and worked on everything from tiny standalone websites to complex distributed systems. He’s a Microsoft MVP, and he regularly speaks at conferences and user groups all over the world.
Dylan is the creator of the Rockstar programming language, and the founder, vocalist and lead guitarist with The Linebreakers, the world's greatest nerd comedy classic rock disco alt punk covers band.
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WhatsApp, Web3, and Wordle: Evolving a Digital Society
We live in a networked world. Between our laptops, our phones, and the smart gadgets in our kitchen, many of us are online 24/7. We work and play, communicate and collaborate, across digital networks powered by open protocols - the standards and specifications that form the backbone of the modern internet. But, within the last decade, we've seen many online interactions move away from open protocols and onto closed platforms. We've abandoned SMS for Signal and WhatsApp, we've abandoned email in favour of Slack, Teams, and Discord; restaurants use Instagram and Facebook instead of running their own websites. And, most of the time, it works – but as more and more of our digital experiences are mediated by corporations and the platforms they control, what does this mean for the future of the internet?
Amidst all the hype about "web 3" and the "metaverse", let's take a moment to remind ourselves how we got here, and remember what's at stake. We'll look back at the promise of "web 2.0" and what it actually delivered, we'll talk about digital identity and net neutrality - and we'll learn what the Apollo/Soyuz space missions have to do with the digital protocols that underlie our connected society.
There's No Such Thing As Plain Text
Software is complicated. Machine learning, microservice architectures, message queues… every few months there’s another revolutionary idea to consider, another framework to learn. And underneath so many of these amazing ideas and abstractions is text. When you work in software, you spend your life working with text. Some of those text files are source code, some are configuration files, some of them are documentation. Editors, revision control systems, programming languages - everything from C# and HTML to Git and VS Code is based on the idea that we’re working with “plain text” files. But… what if I told you there’s no such thing?
When we say something is a plain text file, we’re relying on a huge number of assumptions - about operating systems, editors, file formats, language, culture, history… and, most of the time, that’s OK. But when it goes wrong, good old plain text can lead to some of the weirdest bugs you’ve ever seen. Why is there Chinese in the SQL event logs? Why has the city of Aarhus disappeared? And why does Magnus Mårtensson always have trouble getting into the USA? Join Dylan Beattie for a fascinating look into the hidden world of text files - from the history of mechanical teletypes, to how emoji skin tones actually work. We’ll look at some memorable bugs, some golden rules for working with plain text, and we’ll find out what the phrase “PIKE MATCHBOX” has to do with driving in the Soviet Union.
The Web That Never Was
The story of the web is a story about freedom. It's a story about information, about breaking down barriers, about creating new ways for people to communicate, to collaborate, and to share their ideas. It’s also a story that has as much do with marketing, money and meetings as it does with research and innovation. It’s a story of mediocre ideas that succeeded where brilliant ideas failed, a story of compromises, rushed deadlines and last-minute decisions. And it could so easily have been very, very different.
What if IBM had hired Digital Research instead of Microsoft to develop the operating system for their first PC, way back in 1980? What if Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark had gone to work for Nintendo in 1993 and never founded Netscape? What if one of the team at CERN had said “Tim, won’t it sound a bit silly if everyone spends the next fifty years saying double-you-double-you-double-you all the time”?
In this talk, Dylan Beattie will explore alternative history of the world wide web - a web with no Microsoft, no Windows; no Firefox, no Google and no JavaScript. A software industry from another timeline, a world of platforms, protocols and programming languages that are unmistakably alien - and yet strangely familiar.
So strap in, hold tight, and join us as take you on a journey through... the web that never was.
Level: Intermediate
The Art of Code
Software and technology has changed every aspect of the world we live in. At one extreme are the ‘mission critical’ applications - the code that runs our banks, our hospitals, our airports and phone networks. Then there’s the code we all use every day to browse the web, watch movies, create spreadsheets… not quite so critical, but still code that solves problems and delivers services.
But what about the code that only exists because somebody wanted to write it? Code created just to make people smile, laugh, maybe even dance? Maybe even code that does nothing at all, created just to see if it was possible?
Join Dylan Beattie - programmer, musician, and creator of the Rockstar programming language - for an entertaining look at the art of code. We’ll look at the origins of programming as an art form, from Conway's Game of Life to the 1970s demoscene and the earliest Obfuscated C competitions. We’ll talk about esoteric languages and quines - how DO you create a program that prints its own source code? We’ll look at quine relays, code golf and generative art, and we’ll explore the phenomenon of live coding as performance - from the pioneers of electronic music to modern algoraves and live coding platforms like Sonic Pi.
Open Source, Open Mind: The Cost of Free Software
Free lunch, free speech, free time, free spirit... when we talk about something being "free", that's normally a good thing. But as anybody who's ever given away their software for free will know, it's not that simple - and sometimes, it's not clear what "free software" even means.
At one end of the scale, volunteers use free software to resurrect old laptops, turning e-waste into useful tools they can donate to worthy causes. At the other end of the scale, tech giants use free software packages to create products which generate millions of dollars in profits every year - but when the creators of those packages try to recoup even a tiny part of that revenue, social media goes into an angry meltdown.
Join Dylan Beattie for a look at the past, present, and future of free software. We'll talk about the history of the free software movement, from MIT's Artificial Intelligence lab, to the shareware and public domain movement of the 1980s, to the era of GitHub and package managers. We'll explore why people choose to give their code away for free in the first place - and what happens if they change their mind. We'll talk about licences and legalities, we'll learn about some of the weird and wonderful edge cases that free software has created over the years, and we'll ask the question: is a truly sustainable open source ecosystem possible, and if so - what might it look like?
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.
From Hot Metal to HTML: The Story of Type
Arial, Times New Roman, Consolas, Comic Sans... digital typography has turned us all into typesetters. The tools we use, the apps we build, the emails we send: with so much of our lives mediated by technology, something as seemingly innocuous as picking a typeface can end up defining our relationship with the systems we use, and become part of the identity that we project into the world. Typography is a fundamental part of modern information design, with implications for user experience, accessibility, even performance - and when it goes wrong, it can produce some of the most baffling bugs you've ever seen.
Join Dylan Beattie for a journey into the weird and wonderful history of digital typography, from the origins of movable type in 8th century Asia, to the world of e-ink displays and web typography. We'll look at the relationship between technology and typography over the centuries: the Gutenberg Press, Linotype machines, WYSIWYG and the desktop publishing revolution. What was so special about the Apple II? How do you design a pixel font? We'll learn why they're called upper and lower case, we'll talk about why so many developers find CSS counter-intuitive - and we'll find out why so many emails used to end with the letter J.
Fractals, Factories and Fast Food
We live in a fractal world. Communications, transportation, utilities; from the devices on our wi-fi, to our homes themselves, to the towns and cities where we live and work, our world is built of networks within networks. Some networks are conceptual; models designed to capture one particular dimension of a system or a problem. Some networks are physical; the street outside our front door, the cables and pipes that bring power, water and data into our homes - even the human body is a set of networks, a constant flow of material and information from where it’s available to where it’s needed. And whenever we order a pizza, stream a movie, or even just switch on a light, we’re tapping into an unbelievably complex network of systems and connections that make these everyday conveniences possible.
Dylan Beattie is a nerd. He’s the kind of nerd who invents programming languages for fun. Dylan loves pizza and tech, he doesn’t like phone calls or washing up, and he thinks online food delivery is one of the coolest things we humans have ever invented. But in the grander scheme of things, the journey of a slice of pepperoni pizza - from the app, to the restaurant, to your door - is just a tiny part of a much bigger story. Join Dylan for an entertaining and enlightening look at the technical and social innovations that keep our networked world running: how did we get here? What happens when one of those networks fails? And what does our networked future look like?
Failure is Always an Option
Software runs the world. We use software to manage our calendars, talk to our friends, run our businesses - and, as our societies inevitably try to replace people and paperwork with apps and algorithms, we find ourselves facing some vital questions about the reliability of that software. If you take the time to actually read the terms and conditions, you’ll find that just about every system we rely on comes with no warranties and no safeguards - you use it at your own risk, and if it doesn’t work, that’s your problem.
But there’s more to building reliable systems than just writing good code. Reliability isn’t just about software engineering, it’s about systems engineering; about taking a holistic view of services that includes software, hardware, networks, and people. Join Dylan Beattie for an insightful look at the history of systems engineering, at some of the strategies and design patterns that we can use to build reliability into our systems, and at what happens when the software that runs the world has a bad day.
Email vs Capitalism, or, Why We Can't Have Nice Things
We're not quite sure exactly when email was invented. Sometime around 1971. We do know exactly when spam was invented: May 3rd, 1978, when Gary Thuerk emailed 400 people an advertisement for DEC computers. It made a lot of people very angry... but it also sold a few computers, and so junk email was born.
Fast forward half a century, and the relationship between email and commerce has never been more complicated. In one sense, the utopian ideal of free, decentralised, electronic communication has come true. Email is the ultimate cross-network, cross-platform communication protocol. In another sense, it's an arms race: mail providers and ISPs implement ever more stringent checks and policies to prevent junk mail, and if that means the occasional important message gets sent to junk by mistake, then hey, no big deal - until you're sending out event tickets and discover that every company who uses Mimecast has decided your mail relay is sending junk. Marketing teams want beautiful, colourful, responsive emails, but their customers' mail clients are still using a subset of HTML 3.2 that doesn't even support CSS rules. And let's not even get started on how you design an email when half your readers will be using "dark mode" so everything ends up on a black background.
Email is too big to change, too broken to fix... and too important to ignore. So let's look at what we need to know to get it right. We'll learn about DNS, about MX and DKIM and SPF records. We'll learn about how MIME actually works (and what happens when it doesn't). We'll learn about tools like Papercut, Mailtrap, Mailjet, Foundation, and how to incorporate them into your development process. If you're lucky, you'll even learn about UTF-7, the most cursed encoding in the history of information systems. Modern email is hacks top of hacks on top of hacks... but, hey, it's also how you got your ticket to be here today, so why not come along and find out how it actually works?
Analogue Evolution, Digital Revolution: Tipping Points in Technology
Technological progress is non-linear. Sometimes, innovation is a smooth curve; hundreds of small, incremental improvements over many years – until something comes along that changes the game; something that fundamentally challenges our assumptions around what technology can achieve. Within the last few decades, technology has profoundly and irreversibly changed the shape of human society; how we work, how we relax, how we communicate and collaborate. And, in almost every case, the key has been digitalisation: the ability to take transform part of our reality into a stream of bits.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see the tipping points, to identify the moments when a particular technology or idea achieved critical mass, when something went from being an interesting prototype to a viable product – but for people who were there at the time, it often wasn’t nearly so obvious. In an industry that’s perpetually excited about the “next big thing”, how do developers and technologists decide what to focus on? Should we be thinking about augmented reality? Will machine learning replace developers? Is AI a fun toy, a useful tool – or an existential threat to humanity?
Join Dylan Beattie for an entertaining look at the innovations that really did change the world (and a few that didn’t!), and how understanding our history can help us make sense of the next digital revolution – whatever that turns out to be.
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Dylan Beattie
Creator of the Rockstar programming language
London, United Kingdom
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