How to be a
Rock Star developer
Sean Trelford & his dad (@ptrelford)
DDD East Anglia, Cambridge 2017

Outline of this interactive slide show
• Rock Star Programmers in the wild
• and Ninjas, Boy Scouts and other analogies
• How to rock your interview
• Guitar 747
• How to rock on the job!
• Literally

.Net literally Rocks

Developers rock guitar (mostly Les Pauls)
Russ Miles Dylan Beattie

But Ukeleles
are cool too
A Fun(ctional) music DSL -
Domain Specific Languages -
to compute Ukulele tabs from
chords: Share the chords with
Jérémie and he will show you
where to place your fingers !

Sam Aaron live codes music with Sonic Pi

NDC Oslo
2015
“Sean Trelford, youngest
speaker at #ndcoslo, played a
guitar intro before diving into
F# powering OpenGL” – Liam
Westley

“By 7 you are an openstack architect”

A few more developer
analogies
Sean Trelford & his dad (@ptrelford)
DDD East Anglia, Cambridge 2017

Full Stack
= Loud Speakers

“Boy” Scouts?

… or the IT Crowd

Guitar 101
How to be a Rock Star Developer
Sean Trelford & his dad

Anatomy of a guitar

Rocksmith (or Guitar Hero with a Guitar)

Big Game Hunter: Game in a day

Get the T-Shirt: Let’s start a band

Dazed and Confused Bass Tab

Rocking your interview
How to be a Rock Star Developer
Sean Trelford & his dad

Make a cool demo

Code Test: Fizz Buzz with if/then/else
for i = 1 to 100 do
let text =
if i % 3 = 0 && i % 5 = 0 then "FizzBuzz"
elif i % 3 = 0 then "Fizz"
elif i % 5 = 0 then "Buzz"
else i.ToString()
Console.WriteLine(text)

Code: Fizzbuzz with pattern matching
for i = 1 to 100 do
match i%3, i%5 with
| 0, 0 -> "FizzBuzz"
| 0, _ -> "Fizz"
| _, 0 -> "Buzz"
| _, _ -> i.ToString()
|> Console.WriteLine

Code Golf: Fizz Buzz evaluated on Twitter

Fizz Buzz in APL

Rocking the job!
How to be a Rock Star Developer
Sean Trelford & his dad

Day-to-day Essentials

Rock stars craft their own Instruments
Gibson Buckethead Signature Les Paul
(Played with Guns & Roses, Primus and
many others)
Flea Signature Bass
(Red Hot Chili Peppers Bass Player)

Developers craft their own tools
• Write your own
framework(s)
• Write your own ORM(s)
• Write your own database(s)
• Write your own
programming language(s)

Putting it all together
How to be a Rock Star Developer
Sean Trelford & his dad

The Gamma: Data Journalism

The Gamma: Programming Language

Instruments
Hipster Rock Star

This was
Spinal Tap
This one goes to 11,
please fill in your
feedback form
accordingly ;)