Coding for the Climate: Green Software Development That Cuts Waste and Carbon
Sustainability and top performance have a close connection. In other words, enhancing the speed of software by making algorithms more high-performing can lower the energy required for the process, according to Holly Cummins, a Senior Principal Software Engineer on the Red Hat Quarkus team. This, in turn, could lead to energy-efficient algorithms. She also believes that developers can improve their productivity by doing less and accomplishing more in the process. She has put forward some simple but logical explanations on the steps we can take to achieve sustainability and lower our environmental footprint.
According to Cummins, a sustainable system that performs well needs to have a low memory footprint, a high rate of transmission, and must also evade excessive networking while supporting elastic scaling. These are ideal attributes of the software that people want to use.
It is also a given that manufacturing hardware has its share of negative environmental effects: one, concerning the raw materials used, and two, the carbon generated from the energy used. When the hardware is of no use any longer, it naturally gets discarded into landfills, and e-waste or electronic waste takes the place of non-renewable resources like copper, platinum, and cobalt. Needless to say, e-waste has its share of negative health impacts, especially for those recycling it, so the most logical thing to do is to take measures for e-waste reduction.
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Another noteworthy aspect that Cummins has pointed out is that, many times, the software that is produced is based on archaic ideas. Identifying those ideas might help in reworking the design. As a result, performance is enhanced, delays are reduced, expenses go down, and we end up saving energy.
As far as eliminating software waste is concerned, Cummins believes that while several Java applications are dynamic, they pay a price for it, although the benefits are zero. The Quarkus team, of which she’s a part, resolves this issue by moving more work to build time and letting libraries take up more of the work ahead of time. As a result, apps end up using less memory while running at greater speed. Another technique that might help to do away with software waste is using smaller and more refined Generative AI models that produce more accurate results while reducing expenses and delays.
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Finally, considering building systems to achieve a smaller environmental footprint, Cummins believes that systems should be designed such that they’re easy to switch on and off like a light switch. Essentially, when made, they should be reliable, repeatable, and defined in code. This helps in their automatic shutdown when they’re not in use. She likes to refer to them as LightSwitchOps. In a nutshell, switching things off goes a long way in ensuring substantial savings.
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Source: InfoQ
