What's the best mental model for software construction? The prevailing view draws from physical construction. Terms like architecture, foundation, and plumbing come from our history of building structures like houses, roads, and bridges. In this talk Garrett Smith will argue that biology provides a more useful model. Understanding how organisms function and evolve opens up thinking informed by the universe's most complex and successful systems. Innovations like DNA, photosynthesis, sex and even death contain remarkably useful patterns that we can apply in our day-to-day work as programmers.