Ever wish that your peers called your code a “work of art”? What is it that artful programmers know that makes their work transcend functionality and become something that has value in its essence? There’s a lot that we can learn from the arts, particularly from those that share our linguistic building blocks. Because as all programmers and poets know, writing is easy—it’s writing the good stuff that’s hard.

So what can we take from the study of poetry that would illuminate our own paths as developers? In this talk, I’ll go through some poetic principles that clarify ideas about software development, both in the way we write our code and the way we grow as creators and teammates. We’ll explore the way poets learn to shape their craft and see what we can steal to help our code level up from functioning to poetic.