Blogs

Is it better to replace powerful developer laptops with cloud dev environments? What is the carbon cost of my software development – builds, tests, deploys, code hosting, dev environments?

It’s quite easy to argue that modern civilization is much more robust and resilient than any ancient society, but consider how much of our critical infrastructure is written in memory unsafe languages!

Is it a good idea to make predictions about future energy consumption? Even mature public businesses typically only issue earnings guidance for the next quarter. Maybe it’s because predicting the future is hard?

When I’m talking with a startup founder about a possible investment I’m trying to find out a few things: team, scale, timing, product, developer flow, stickiness.

Is cryptocurrency / Bitcoin bad for the environment? In 2019 crypto consumed 70-90 TWh of electricity globally, with 60-70 TWh of that from Bitcoin mining. What that means for carbon emissions depends on where the mining happens.

Why isn’t carbon aware workload scheduling more common? Data center level scheduling is infeasible, so what are the opportunities for developers to implement more granular functionality?

Customers should now be asking their suppliers for the carbon footprint of the software services they buy.

Using a marginal emissions-based sustainability score incentivizes migrating workloads to a region with a lower marginal emissions factor. The emissions factor for that workload would reduce, but does it incentivize the deployment of new clean energy?

The ultimate goal is a reduction in emissions, but we can’t analyze improvements without reporting energy per unit of work done.

An example of poor quality research with flawed assumptions designed as click-bait to get news coverage timed to land during COP26. Deleting a few photos will have zero impact on your carbon footprint.