Salesforce’s EVP and Chief Impact Officer, Suzanne DiBianca, is urging coders to consider climate change when writing software. While efforts have been made to reduce energy consumption in data centers and shift electrical grids away from fossil fuels, the focus is now shifting towards making software, crypto proof of work, and AI compute power more environmentally friendly.
A survey conducted by Salesforce found that 75% of technologists want software to have less environmental impact, but half of them don’t know how to achieve it. This lack of knowledge and commitment from management is hindering progress in sustainable software development.
Although sustainability in other areas of IT, such as data centers and workplaces, is well developed, making software greener is still challenging for many organizations. The metrics for measuring software sustainability are still evolving, making it difficult to gauge the carbon footprint of large enterprise applications.
One way to write greener code is by using artificial intelligence, but some argue that AI itself is a compute-intensive process and may not be the best solution for energy efficiency in software development. Nevertheless, DiBianca suggests that designers can play a role in making software more sustainable by choosing the most eco-friendly options as the default choice in design.
Efficient code can reduce energy consumption, but coders also need visibility into the performance of their code from an energy use perspective to make meaningful improvements. Hardware infrastructure plays a crucial role in energy efficiency, and optimizing data centers and cooling systems can have a more significant impact than fine-tuning individual lines of code.
Overall, making software greener is a complex challenge that requires a combination of efforts from coders, designers, and organizations, along with continuous improvements in sustainability metrics and practices.
