Depending on where you draw your measurements from, the first programming languages for use on ‘modern’ electric computers were designed in the ’40s and ’50s. CSS, on the other hand, is a mere adolescent—born in 1996, it’s just 18 years old. This means that software engineers have had over four decades’ head start on us: we should be listening to a lot more of what they have to say. In this talk, we’ll take a look at some very traditional computer science and software engineering paradigms and how we can steal, bend, borrow, and reimplement them when writing our CSS. Writing CSS like software engineers so that we can become better CSS developers.