Liking someone’s status on Facebook or quickly searching Yelp for breakfast options nearby are some of the things we start our days with. Did you know that performing a simple Google Search generates 0.2g of carbon dioxide if you consider the carbon footprint of all the components in the software stack - which includes, browser, backend servers, networking calls, running algorithms, etc.
In this talk, I would like to initiate a thought of Carbon footprint aware software development.

Software development includes writing massive amounts of code that can run in parallel, and that scales to millions of devices and handles petabytes to exabytes of data. With blockchain technologies such as Bitcoin gaining notoriety for increased usage of electricity, and therefore increased carbon footprint, it has generated interest in the software community to revisit non-blockchain code and check its impact on the environment.
For example, as software developers, writing clean and efficient code helps with debuggability and readability, but removing dead code is one of the most efficient ways to reduce the CPU cycles needed to process that code, and the memory taken up by the code. This inturn reduces the electricity used by the chunk of code. In this talk, I would like to also cover some of the techniques that can be leveraged by Software developers to write code with less impact on the environment. Furthermore, just like we write unit tests to check functionality and catch regressions, I propose having environment regression analysis as a part of the CI/CD pipelines for each code check-in. We’d explore the tools available to do so. These would help us quantify the impact of a code change, and potentially point to “hot” spots in our code. I will briefly cover a sample use case of uploading a file in Google Drive, and the amount of energy expended by the software stack.

Code uses energy, bad code uses more energy. I just want to put a thought out there for software developers to be aware of what they write and check its impact beyond their project alone.