No matter what propaganda you might be getting served from news channels or politicians, climate change is real.
As someone who has been in tech for the best part of my adult life, I think a lot about how digital technologies can get greener. By tech I mean software, and by software I mean software is eating the world.
Very soon, AI might also be eating us and all of our energy if it already not doing that.
Actionables for you and I
No matter which industry you work in, the world is pretty bleak right now. But here is something you can do NOW in order to better understand how the software you are developing is contributing towards carbon emissions.
each build matters
CI / CD pipelines are used by both individuals and enterprises to automate complex build processes and streamline testing workflows. Even though a single build might not contribute significantly towards carbon emissions, when you understand that these pipelines run hundreds of times every single working day, and at regular intervals during holidays, it is easy to imagine how a small carbon footprint for a single build process can exponentially result in thousands of grams of carbon every week / month.
Optimizing a workflow yaml file might only saves you a couple of 100 seconds every run, but it can result in hours of saved time and hundreds of saved carbon emissions.