Dylan Beattie
- Pronouns: He/Him
- Talk Length: 60 minute Keynote
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.
About Dylan
Software Architect
Dylan wrote his first web page in 1992 and never looked back. He's been building data-driven web applications since the late 1990s, and has worked on everything from tiny standalone websites to complex distributed systems. He's the CTO at Skills Matter in London, he's a Microsoft MVP, and he's a regular speaker at conferences and user groups, where he's spoken about topics from continuous delivery and Conway's Law to the history of the web, federated authentication and hypermedia APIs. When he's not wrangling code, Dylan plays guitar and writes songs about code.