We can do more and better


I like efficiency and I believe everybody likes it too, even though we do not always demand for it. In general. When traveling, buying, even eating I want to optimize time and resources in the broader sense. In other words save my energy. Sounds reasonable, huh? Every time I have to fill some paper form I hate it, because I love technology. It seems like everything looks better in the digital world, right? Moreover we know that papers means less trees (and everybody loves trees) even though we love using our job's printers. So on the contrary I always prefer digital things: apps for everyone. At first glance the digital world looks so attractive, efficient, faster, and in different flavours and colours.

This idea has sounded nice in my mind for long time...until a few months ago.

Now let's take a break to breath. We are on the top of a hill staring at the ocean and it looks quite nice. If the end of the world has began, it has not dropped by here.

Now, move your direction and imagine you are standing somewhere in California in August 2020, say Napa. It is hot, isn't it?


I don't wanna be some sort of dramatic, but the world is dying and Software Industry is guilty too.

🤚 So let's start from the beginning. Every single entity, object, thing uses energy in this planet. To live, to move, to grow up, to exist. How much and at what cost it is what matters.

Just because technology is doing well a few things doesn't mean it is doing efficiently.

Back to the digital world. What do we really know about energy efficiency behind our favourites apps? Payments, Social, Banking, Blogging, Email and so many others. I dunno about you but me, ZERO. Rarely we think about how much energy is my lovely foody picture on Instagram consuming under the wood. Your digital actions are traveling around the globe through wires, are processed somewhere and are replicated (most likely) in others (and yes, even my action of writing right now is travelling long away). And here it is where your carbon footprint comes to place.

It is strange the way we live. Most of the time we support climate change strikes, we hate Trump (verified), we love 

 (verified), but we rarely look around us, ourselves, our actions. We only do it if this affects directly our pockets, our routine, our life. Well, it is affecting us but maybe we choose to close our eyes and ears: electricity outages, wildfires, even 

 in Stockholm and I had one of those moments of 

 almost at the end of the last day. The conference's focus was entirely performance in general around Java stack (or at least the talks I attended). But it was during the 

In Software Engineering there is an interesting topic which most of you know: the 

. This is used quite commonly in job interviews and it is a way to describe an algorithm's performance in terms of time/space complexity according to its growth rates. But let's be honest once: How many times has the business punched you in the face to deliver features faster? Along the way developers adopt better practices, write better code. That's true. But code is not everything. How to keep efficiency when you deal with legacy systems where more than 20 developers have written code following different approaches, learning paths?. The code is not everything. The code is not enough. Whenever we need more memory we change the instance type in our favourite cloud provider, as if we were going shopping with our parent's credit card. 

"Rarely anyone ever stops and thinks about performance as a whole"

So I started to dig deeper in articles, papers, follow environmentalist folks, look for tech solution and initiatives to collaborate. But it is dangerous. 

The more you learn, the more you realize how vulnerable the planet is

There are uncountable resources to be aware of with numbers out there. Let's share some and put them in perspective. I would like to introduce some equivalency. First of all we should know that there are so many ways to affect negatively the planet. For the sake of my catharsis I would like to introduce the following equivalency:


kWh = Kilowatt/hour of electricity
CO2 = Carbon Dioxide

, U.S. national weighted average CO2 marginal emission rate, year 2018 data.U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC.

* This is an estimation because the real calculation is pretty much tied to the electricity network of the place you want to measure and many other factors. But it is a good approach though.

The energy consumption of computer will vary because there are so many different hardware configurations. Common ranges is in the 15-300 watt per hour range.

How much energy is your computer consuming in a typical daily work?

Internet and information industry is growing faster and lead to an explosion in energy use:

36% of energy is consumed by communication networks, 30% by data centers, and 34% by computers

The energy required by digital devices is much more (7%) than the global energy consumption all over the world (3%)

Production and operation of ICT will rise to about 21% in 2030

There are about 509,147 data centers that are 26.6 million square meters with 430 hyperscale data-centers

There are about 8,918,157,500 active mobile devices consuming about 2 kWh/year energy

The energy consumption by users is about 55% and 45% by manufacturers

There are about 20% phone users, 19% data centers, and 16% networks consuming energy

Computer manufacturing takes about 17% energy, TVs take 11%, smartphones take 11% and others take 6%

About 0.0003 kWh is consumed while charging mobile over USB for 7 minutes

Visiting Amazon consumes 0.0003 kWh, streaming 5 MB MP3 song takes 0.025 kWh, watching 5 minutes YouTube video takes 0.065 kWh, streaming 3 GB movie takes 14.65 kWh, and online video game takes about 78.13 kWh

Bitcoin takes about 20 TWh energy per year with aluminum consuming more energy as compared to other cryptocurrencies

Long story short, human activity emits CO2, high level of this gas in our atmosphere is changing the earth’s climate....and that is bad. You can read part of the story 

As I said before, apps run because some nice (shy and bad) code is running in servers, which are somewhere in rooms called 

, where in order to be able to keep your social timeline up to date are built with the complex equipments which need high amount of energy to work.

According to a study from Procedia Environmental Sciences, 48% of the power in a datacenter goes to equipment such as servers and racks, 33% to HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning), 8% to UPS (uninterrupted power supply) losses, 3% to lighting, and 10% to everything else.


Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

 have been doing different things to be carbon-neutral and they aim to decarbonize completely in the coming years. Of course they are responsible for the biggest part of the cake. I strongly recommend reading the last updates in this topic from them.

The virtual world is built on physical infrastructure. Every search that gets submitted, email sent, page served, comment posted, and video loaded passes through data centers that can be larger than a football field. Those thousands of racks of humming servers use vast amounts of energy; together, all existing data centers use roughly

, and if left unchecked, this energy demand could grow as rapidly as Internet use. So making data centers run as efficiently as possible is a very big deal.

SMART (and green) DESIGN: Fewer machines and less electricity


As I see it in the software industry there are lots of challenges which go from how a solution is designed until it is running in Production.

Improve the code (better algorithms, is it Sci-fi?).

Improve code review (surely there is room for improvements).

Demand for numbers visibility in your company

 (Cloud energy Consumption, Teams, external services, etc.)

find out your carbon footprint of your searches

Energy consumption must be another metric in your business dashboard.

Be efficient on the cloud: instances types, database, lambdas, logging, etc.

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You don't need 4.392.710.437 browser tabs open at the same time, come on!

there is a temporary reduction in daily global CO2 emissions during the COVID-19 forced confinement

.

The CO2 emission along the history and a clear pattern in around some of biggest events which change the world.


There are a few sites to explore which make you be really scared about: