Strange Loop

Carbon Footprint Aware Software Development

Liking someone’s status on Facebook or quickly searching Yelp for breakfast options nearby are some of the things we start our days with. Did you know that performing a simple Google Search generates 0.2g of carbon dioxide if you consider the carbon footprint of all the components in the software stack, which includes, browser, backend servers, networking calls, etc. In this talk, I would like to initiate a thought of Carbon footprint aware software development. Software development includes writing massive amounts of code that can run in parallel, and that scales to millions of devices and handles petabytes to exabytes of data. With blockchain technologies such as Bitcoin gaining notoriety for increased usage of electricity, and therefore increased carbon footprint, it has generated interest in the software community to revisit non-blockchain code and check its impact on the environment. In this talk, I would like to also cover some of the techniques that can be leveraged by Software developers to write code with less impact on the environment. Furthermore, just like we write unit tests to check functionality and catch regressions, I propose having environment regression analysis as a part of the CI/CD pipelines for each code check-in. We’d explore the tools available to do so. Code uses energy, bad code uses more energy. I just want to put a thought out there for software developers to be aware of what they write and check its impact beyond their project alone.

Tejas Chopra

Netflix, Inc.

Tejas Chopra is a Senior Software Engineer, working in the Data Storage Platform team at Netflix, where he is responsible for architecting storage solutions to support Netflix Studios and Netflix Streaming Platform. Prior to Netflix, Tejas was working on designing and implementing the storage infrastructure at Box, Inc. to support a cloud content management platform that scales to petabytes of storage & millions of users. Tejas has worked on distributed file systems & backend architectures, both in on-premise and cloud environments as part of several startups in his career. Tejas is an International Keynote Speaker and periodically conducts seminars on Software Development & Cloud Computing and has a Masters Degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, with a specialization in Computer Systems.