There are plenty of good reasons to attend Zabbix Summit 2025, but one of the most important is the fact that this year’s Summit will feature Dylan Beattie as a special guest speaker. A Software Development Consultant and Founder of Ursatile, Dylan is an international keynote speaker, and a long-time contributor to the open-source community. He’s also a Microsoft MVP and has created Rockstar, an esoteric programming language that started as an inside joke and ended up being featured in Classic Rock magazine.
At the Summit, Dylan will give a talk titled “Open Source, Open Minds. The Cost of Free Software.” We asked him about his beginnings in the tech industry, what drove the creation of Rockstar, and why communication is the key to successful software development.
Can you tell us a bit about your journey into software development? How did you get started, and was there any particular moment when you realized that you were on the right path?
Like a lot of folks in tech, I got started on the 8-bit home computers of the 1980s – mine was an Amstrad 6128, which came with a couple of fairly mediocre games, but it also had a BASIC and a LOGO interpreter, and I pretty quickly found out that writing little programs and trying to create my own games was way more fun than playing the games which were included with it. I graduated from that to a 286 PC with MS—DOS 5, Windows 3.1 – but I really wasn’t thinking about it as a career.
The turning point was when I was sixteen years old, and I was supposed to be going to university to study mathematics. Dad brought home a new 486 PC a couple of weeks before my final exams, I spent my study leave messing around on the computer instead of studying, and when I didn’t get the grades I needed for my university course I figured maybe that was a sign I should be studying computer science instead. I went to Southampton and got a bachelor’s degree in computer science, learned C, C++, Lisp, SQL, and HTML. I graduated right as the dot-com bubble was bursting but still managed to get a job building data-driven web applications, and I’ve never really looked back.
You talk a lot about the human side of software. Why do you think communication is such a critical skill in development?
One of the perennial challenges facing the craft of programming is that it can be a profoundly solitary activity. One person working on their own can create an app or a game, put it online, and share their creation with literally millions of people – no meetings, no emails, just one person cranking out code. But then you try to translate those coding skills into domains like banking, healthcare, aviation, domains where software quality can have a real, material effect on people’s lives, and you realize that the code is actually the easy part.
The ability to talk to people, figure out what they need, help them understand your own ideas; to create consensus and avoid misunderstanding? It’s way more important than being able to crank out code. The most expensive problems I’ve had to deal with in my career haven’t been bugs in the code, they’ve been misunderstandings about what the team is doing and why it matters.
How did you end up creating a programming language (Rockstar) that can do double-duty as rock lyrics?
Good question! So, there’s always been this trope of the “rockstar programmer” – these mythical, high-powered, hyper-productive developers who can crank out millions of lines of fast, flawless code – and about a decade ago there was a massive spike in recruiters putting out adverts for “rockstar programmers.” When somebody suggested on Twitter that somebody should create a programming language called Rockstar to really confuse recruiters, that gave me an idea.
Initially it was just a piece of comedy writing – a parody of a programming language specification. I wanted to see if it was possible to extract enough clichés from rock music to create a formal grammar for a Turing-complete programming language that read exactly like song lyrics. It turns out that the answer is yes! I published the parody spec on GitHub, it got shared on Reddit and Hacker News, and the whole thing snowballed from there. Eventually I had no choice but to actually build a Rockstar interpreter, which turned out to be way more difficult than I thought, but also a lot of fun. The latest version is online here – it’s built in C#, compiles to native binaries for WIndows, Linux, and macOS, plus there’s a web assembly version on the website so curious folks can run Rockstar right in their browser without having to download anything!
Before taking on a speaking slot at this year’s Summit, how familiar were you with Zabbix? What has your experience of using it been like?
I’ve got to be honest – I’m not sure I’d ever heard of Zabbix before I was invited to speak at Zabbix Summit 2025, but that’s not unusual. I get invited to a lot of events that are focused around a particular technology or platform, and it’s a constant reminder of just how vast our industry is that somebody will organize a conference around a product I’ve never even heard of and attract literally hundreds of smart, curious people who want to share their own experiences and learn from each other. One thing about Zabbix which was particularly interesting to me when I started researching it was the licensing model. I think it’s a relatively unusual example of a commercially sustainable product or software that’s published under the Affero GPL license, so I’m really looking forward to chatting with other attendees about that and how that’s influenced their decision to use it.
You’re famous for your detailed and theatrical presentations – what makes a technical talk memorable to you?
A great talk is one that really connects with an audience, and the best way I’ve found to do that is to look for the little things that we all do every day that we’ve all learned just accept at face value, even when we have no idea why they work that way. Why is a capital “A” ASCII code 65 but a lowercase “a” is code 97? Why is validating email addresses difficult? Why is vertically aligning something in CSS such a big deal? There’s a good chance that a lot of folks in the audience have asked themselves that same question at some point, so the curiosity is already there. Tapping into that curiosity gets their attention, and then you can tell them the good stuff: the history, the stories, the personalities, the decisions.
There’s a lot of stuff in tech which feels kinda stupid, but none of it was designed to be stupid (well, except Rockstar!) Once you understand the context and the history, everything makes a lot more sense – and then at some point, maybe months later, you’ll hit a weird text encoding bug, or a problem with a system that won’t accept certain kinds of email addresses, and you’ll remember the talk. I get email from folks sometimes talking about how something from one of my presentations has helped them fix a weird bug years after they saw the presentation. That’s a great feeling.
Can you drop any hints about your presentation at this year’s Summit? What should audience members expect?
Sure! We’re going to talk about MIT, laser printers, software, Commander Keen, Doom, Quake, Netscape, the origins of the term “open source”, Linksys routers, WordPress, how the xz-utils backdoor nearly ended up compromising about half the computers on the internet – and a really cute story about a squirrel. It’s going to be awesome. I can’t wait!