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In this week’s episode, literal developer rockstar Dylan Beattie joins me on DevEducate to talk about writing parody songs for developers, handling live performances at conferences, and creative ways to incorporate music into developer content and education.
Talking Points
- How Dylan combines his love of programming with music
- Parallels between programming and music
- How music and learning science are related
- Working music into developer marketing and education
<Blockquotes>
Lightly edited for context
“You could get a laptop, open it up, open up Garage Band, record a song, stick it on SoundCloud, and the rest of the world can hear it today, for free.” – Dylan
“I think a lot of developers are also musicians and there's something about working with an intangible abstraction.” – Dylan
“My kids are young and I see them every day learning songs in kindergarten and preschool just to learn stuff and remember it.” – Kamran
“What you do is you find the people who think like you do and have shared experiences and get excited about the same things you get excited about.” – Dylan
“Music is another element that sometimes is a good way to tell a story.” – Dylan
“The day that you play the guitar for money when you don't wanna play is the day you start to hate it. And once you start to hate it, you will never get it back.” – Dylan
“The idea costs 1 point. Writing the lyrics is 10 points. Making the music is 100. Making the video to go with it is 1000. And then getting it to a point where the rest of the band know the material and you are on stage at a show in another country with the video all queued up and you’re ready to go? The idea is not the hard part.” – Dylan
“There’s something very, very primal about music.” – Dylan
“Come back when we have Roady AI cause that's actually gonna solve a real problem.” – Dylan
“If you take the idea of music and you take the idea of learning and then you marry it with programming education, there's so much stuff that you could probably do there. It might just depend exactly on having the right kind of creative use case for it.” – Kamran
“Someone at Ubisoft Montreal who was an audio engineer and who knew how to play music actually recorded an entire concept album that was in the style of an 80s heavy metal band called Star Lord.” – Kamran
“If I hear a snippet of any of Alexander Brandon's soundtrack from that game, there's a moment when I'm like, ‘Ah, that was an amazing holiday.’ And then I'm like, that wasn't a holiday, that was a computer game that you played.” – Dylan
Links
- Dylan’s website / LinkedIn / Mastodon
- Dylan’s parody songs on YouTube (plus re:bass)
- NDC Oslo – the conference where Dylan and his band typically play
- Render:ATL – a conference in Atlanta which feels more like a festival
- Karaoke Version – songs without vocals
- Sonic Pie – musical programming platform
- Musicfy – Musical AI tool
- ATARI ST - The Best Music Computer Ever? – credit to Espen Kraft for the sample
- Steinberger travel guitar
- How We Created the Star Lord Band – Ubisoft’s 80s heavy metal concept album
- Why Does Music Evoke Memories?
Creators & Guests
Host
What is DevEducate: The Art of Teaching Developers at Scale?
Discover how to engage and market to developers without being sales-y through developer education. Listen to interviews with experts and leaders in the DevRel space so you can uncover the strategies and tactics that will help you blow away barriers to developer adoption.