How To Be a 'Rockstar' Developer - building the Rockstar language

How To Be a 'Rockstar' Developer - a hardcore deep-dive session where Dylan builds a recursive descent parser and interpreter for the Rockstar language in an hour.

There will be the usual drinks and pizza!

We’ve all heard about the idea of the ‘rockstar developer’ - maybe you’ve heard your boss talk about hiring a ‘rockstar’, or maybe you’ve seen the job adverts looking for ‘rockstar developers’ on IT job boards. But what if EVERYBODY could be a rockstar developer?

In 2018, Dylan Beattie created Rockstar, an esoteric programming language designed for creating programs that are also rock song lyrics. Rockstar was initially created as a joke - a parody specification that combined features from programming languages like VBScript, Perl and Ruby with lyrical conventions from classic rock artists like Bon Jovi, Meat Loaf and Deep Purple. Then people started submitting issues. Then they started submitting pull requests. Then somebody created an implementation… and another, and another.

Before long, Rockstar was on the front page of Hacker News, the front page of Reddit, and was even featured in Classic Rock magazine. What started as a joke had become a fully fledged open source project - and so, in 2019, Dylan and a few dedicated ‘Rockstar developers’ set out to create a formal reference implementation, complete with a parser, an evaluator, a specification and change control process, and - of course - lots of awesome Rockstar swag. In this talk, Dylan will share ideas and insight from working on the Rockstar project. It’s partly a talk about programming language design; partly a talk about running an open source project - and partly the true story of what happens when you try to implement a programming language that was invented in a bar.

Dylan Beattie is a systems architect and software developer, who has built everything from tiny standalone websites to large-scale distributed systems. He’s currently the CTO at Skills Matter in London, where he juggles his time between working on their software platform, supporting their conference and community teams, and speaking at various conferences and events they organise in London. From 2003 to 2018, he worked as webmaster, then IT Manager, and then systems architect at Spotlight, where his first-hand experience of watching an organisation and their 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 is actively involved in the international software development community. As well as his work with Skills Matter, he runs the London .NET User Group, he’s served on the programme committee for conferences including NDC London, BuildStuff, FullStack and ProgNET, and he’s a frequent speaker at conferences and technical events around the world.

Dylan grew up in southern Africa, moving to the UK with his family when he was ten. He’s a Microsoft MVP and holds a degree in Computer Science from the University of Southampton. He’s a guitar player and songwriter, known for creating musical parodies about software development. He’s into skiing, scuba diving, Lego, cats, travel and photography, and he’s normally found hanging around user groups, pubs and rock bars in London wearing a big black hat.