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net Rocks Portugal Edition. I'm Carl Franklin. We're at NDC Porto. Yeah,
and just like last time, when we're in here, the sun is
out, yes, when we walk side to the hotel. Poor. Yeah.
I got to tell you that I was here the first day I was
here, yesterday, I was walking around. I got an umbrella, like
a four euro umbrella. Boy took get outside and the wind and it went
and it turned into like a big mangle of metal and broken four year four
euro pinata. Yeah, wind pinata. I gave it instantly smashed one minute
for each euro. That's how long it lasted. And then I got smart
and bought a ten euro umbrella which was quite a bit more sturdy and worked
really well. And feeling all smugs. Somebody in the hotel speaker said,
you know, the hotel will just give you an umbrella. Thanks. I
feel smart now, Yeah, I feel smart now. Hey, let's roll
the music for better no framework, all right. So at breakfast the other
day I was asking my friend Richard Campbell's HoloLens. I haven't heard anything about
Microsoft HoloLens in a long time, and He's gone, I don't know.
So of course I went and did what most people do. I Google it.
Banged it enough Google bang And so it turns out there's a story from
on MSFT like on Microsoft dot com from October eleventh. Microsoft releases Windows Holographic
twenty three h two update. Nice, here's what's new, And so I
guess there's uh. You know, they've got their military version close to deployment
now, and you can see in this article that their people in the army
weren't wearing it, and you know it's been a big project for them.
Yeah, and it's a big, multi billion dollar contract they have with the
army, and so hopefully that will turn into good stuff for us in the
future. Yeah. I presume this is just Windows ten, but the holographic
edition, so Windows eleven. Yeah, I think it's still ten. That
they're using for the Hololends too. I don't know they've actually moved up to
the new Okay, which why you know they because Windows ten is getting a
twenty three h two. So this is the equivalent, just for the holographic
edition, right right, right right? Okay? Well, anyway, so
you can click on the HoloLens to release notes from October tenth, twenty twenty
three and read all about it. So there's no real product as far as
I know yet. You can still buy a HoloLens two, but you can
get a Halo Lends two. It's four grand and it's been years. Yeah,
it's been years, and I don't see you hardware on the immediate horizon.
But you know, they all they've they've basically been talking about we're waiting
for the right chipset, like the right REV to come along. It gives
us enough battery life and enough things that it's gonna be worth making the next
one. Right. Meanwhile, Meta Quest three, yeah, is five hundred
dollars. Yeah, although it's a VR headset, not a VR, not
an AR. Yes, but everybody says it's a lot of fun. Yeah.
I've got a quest too. I have to decide whether I want to
upgrade a quest three? Yeah, me too. Cool. Anyway, that's
what I'm thinking about today. Who's talking to us today right well, knowing
we're going to talk about sustainable development. Yes. I dug back into the
archives and I found a show from twenty eleven, episode seven twenty five,
so twelve hundred episodes ago. In December twenty eleven. I think I was
fourteen years old at that time. I don't think that's true. We talked
to Kathy Malone, who was a tech ed speaker about being a green developer.
Great conversation, you know, forty five minutes long. And know she's
gotten here, there and everywhere, and admittedly quite a while ago. And
there was a comment on the show at the time, eleven years ago.
This is from Timothy Clinky who said, in our company, telling a developer
to make their code more environmentally friendly means they need to make it more green
by adding comments they come up green in they tell a sense you know,
Oh, come on, it's what it does. It really does that.
I thought it was funny, Tim, I thought it was real funny.
I did not. It's pretty funny. Okay, Well, you say,
Tim, I'm going to send you a copy of music Code by whether Carl
thought it was funny or not. It made me laugh. So and if
you'd like a copy of music Code by write a comment on the website at
don at Rocks dot com or on the facebooks. We publish every show there
and if you comment there and a read on the show, we'll send you
a copy of music Code by write a green comment, please very green.
You know, if it's only put the double slash on it, it'll be
Greening'll be fine. Yeah, And you can definitely follow us on Twitter if
you want to. But the cool kids are over at Macedon. I'm at
Carl Franklin at Techhub dot social and I'm Rich Campbell at Macedon dot social.
Send us a two We will read them. And with that, let me
introduce the one the only Leah Close. Yes, let's go okay. Leah
is a passionate technologist that loves to get people together to solve problems. With
about ten years of working as a software engineer, Leah has been work working
in London as a c sharp back end engineer delivering value to fund apps clients
for the last five years. Fund Apps plural fundaps is clients for the last
five years. Yes, yes, and we're talking about sustainable development. But
first, welcome to dot NetRocks. Thank you very much. It's very sure
to have you here and such a cool topic. Yes, and I really
liked that we talked about this, you know, twelve years ago, because
I've got to hope things have progressed. So when you say sustainable development,
what do you mean? Yeah, I think sustainable development changed over the years.
To me, it means I only buy a laptop every other year,
nice, not every year. Yeah, I mean when we talk about sustainable
there are like three aspects, like if you read online if you google it,
economical, social, and environmental. Obviously, because you're here talking about
green we are talking a bit more about environmental impact. I think, you
know, like last decades or even more, it was how do you make
developers code most sustainably, not create tech? That and all of that to
that To me, that that says maintainable rather than which is a kind of
sustainability exactly. But it's a different I would say, it's a different kind
of sustainability. It's not environmental, right, sustainability, Like they're different aspects.
Sure, without and can I stay the obvious like planet is fucked.
So we are more thinking about environmental aspects nowadays. Don't use AI, don't
use the cloud and listen, the planet's fine. It's all of us that
have got the problem. Like the planet's going to make it. We may,
we may be burned off, still be here. You know, when
I do the climate change talk for the high schoolers, you talk about the
in the e scene, which is like twenty four million years ago, carbon
dioxide was at eleven hundred parts per million, right as opposed to that right
now for eighteen it's like planet was here. Heck, it was just a
big old pile algae, that's all. You know, Antarctica had probably had
trees growing on it. So it is we are. The troubles we're having
are impacting humans being able to function here exactly. So all of the fires
and the floods and sea levels rising, and that's just direct impact, like
people not being able to live on this planet. Right there is also like
all the health issues and what's causing that the subtler parts yea of all these
things. So you basically have three categories. But I'm immediately thinking there's got
to be hundreds of issues and topics that we could talk about, right,
Yeah, it's got to be hundreds, and I'm sure there is. But
as software engineers and software professionals, we can talk about cool and what we
can do. And I learned yesterday that twenty to twenty five percent of electricity
usage can be attributed to a digital sector. Sure, And I mean that's
why we are talking about it even more, and that's why it is more
important. And even Richard, you had to talk about future of electricity,
of energy, actually the future of energy. Yeah, and our move towards
using less carbon emitting energy sources which certainly helps matters. Yes, but it
is interesting in the news, especially around the large language models, which are
very compute intensive. Now there's folks talking about, well, just how much
energy is that? Is it really necessary? Also the cooling parts of it,
you're complaining the cloud vendors and Microsoft's among them, have come up with
strategies to make very inexpensive cooling systems for computers, but they're fairly water intensive,
and so the you know the sort of reality of you're taking fresh water
and you're essentially missing it into these data centers to cool them. What could
go wrong? Well, they tell you what the cost of it. I
built an I nine machine in my house and it has a giant heat sting
on the CPU. And when I say giant, like I can I can
barely get the case cover on it, right, that's how big it is.
It's probably a half a foot square, but it's probably a couple of
pounds of cover. Yeah right, yeah, But it's really quiet and it's
really cool, right, and it doesn't require water cooling, and it's an
nine nine like it's a beefy machine. Yeah. And the graphics also,
yeah, the modern video cards. You look at the family assemblies that are
on those. That's not trivial either. The real question is if you pinned
it, like if you had that process or working flat out, how warm
would it get? I mean, you know question. We know that cooler
would disperse that heat. But that's just means it's in the room and it's
a let's say say it's a client machine, right, yeah, it's not
a server machine serving up lots of CPU. Yeah. But I wouldn't want
my I wouldn't want my data center to be completely reliant on solar energy either,
because okay, my servers down, yeah, I mean they use a
lot of hydrological power like one. Since I would think that in general,
the cloud movement has meant that a relatively few number of people are responsible for
a tremendous amount of compute availability, and when green requirements are put on them,
they have a better chance of implementing it than we do if everybody was
building their own data center. Yeah, I mean it's tier if numbers right,
But like economy of scale, if we all use cloud providers, surely
we can push them to do something better and in a better way. Plus
we can all reuse these resources instead of every one of us having a server
at home. Yeah, running ten percent utilization. I think it's also that's
true. I think it's also making us lazy. Yeah, well, I
don't know that we've ever prioritized this. Like if you think about the priorities
of a software developer, it's like one, make it work. Two,
make it work fast right, Three make it work so that somebody else could
possibly fix it. Like, where is any other consideration at that point?
Make it available all the time. Yeah, yeah, I don't remember these
times because probably I was not born or I was just a kid. But
I mean, once upon a time, memory and CPU and hardware were very
expensive and constraint and huge. Yeah, it was a massive expense. So
like you did need to consider how you code it was it needed to be
super efficient. It need to be for computers. That's how we got solid
principles, like we were writing from machines to be efficient well because we had
to, because we had to exactly. We also limited the feature stat accordingly,
like yes, once upon a time you could not waste cycles on a
guy, much less a touchscreen. Yeah, you know that's a lot of
extra compute. Yeah. We move now into a world of memory is cheap,
CPUs, cheap, storage is infinite. Storage is infinite. You can
scale these servers, you can add more nodes, you can add more memory
and CPU on fly. It's very easy. Yeah. Yeah. And everything
was about performance, like everything was like I wanted them immediately. Yeah,
and that's a great version of performance. Not even the code is fast,
but you got the code written fast, like the performance of get the feature
out. Get the feature out, but also run it fast. But not
by writing the code performance all scale it and like it's going to be one
hundred nodes and it's going to be super quick. I will fix this with
the giant compute button exactly. So do you see your role as shining light
on these inefficiencies and saying, you know, hey, we have to get
better at this or do you have solutions to these problems that can be implemented
today. Yes and no. Well it's a complicated question, but I do
think we need to change something. It's either for the planet because we see
what's happening, we can get smarter at it. But it's also if we
don't do something as software engineers, our boss is going to come after us
and it's going to say you need to write it in this way because either
government told me that I need to, or because we can't sign any more
clients because they are all asking for all of these checks that we are thinking
about these things. I mean even in Fundos now, all of our prospects
are looking for these vendor checks and like are you doing this? Are you
doing that? And the reason why we get the signature, well not only
because of that, but it's because we are thinking about these things and at
the moment they are optional. They're not there if you would, you know,
if companies thinking about it and thinking about the environment. But in my
opinion. Soon this is going to be a must. It's going to be
a mandatory. Yeah. Well, and I wonder if it just won't become
table sticks. Like Microsoft and all of these tech companies have been talking a
lot about zero carbon and zero impact technology centers. Then you know, they
help check those boxes off for you. And one could argue that some of
this is quote unquote greenwashing, like are they really doing anything about it?
But it also makes it easy for us. It's like, hey, just
write your code, don't worry, we'll make sure it has no impact on
the planet. Right, But they also bill us by the minute for the
compute. Like there is an angle on this. It says, if I
write my code more efficiently, it will actually cost me less. You know,
when you own the computer and you don't fully utilize it anyway, you
don't care. You have all the computing and you have enough compute for what
you're doing. But if you're charged by the transaction and by the compute load
writing more efficient code, that's money in the bank. So get up,
Copilot, I'll go. Let's say while true and get up COPI Mmmm,
you can't do that. That's a tight loop. Yeah, I mean we
do have servilis at the moment. Like all of these cloud providers, you
can spin up. You can spin up containers when you need them. Then
you can scale them down and shut them down. You can turn on these
lambders. I mean even us when we code, we have the massive problems
of things taking too long. Sure, and you develop something for a client
that is very simple, things take I don't know, five minutes, and
then it scales up. You get a more complex client takes two and a
half hours. For let's say a badge process. You remove a too string
that it's done tens of millions of times. It saves half an hour.
Yeah, no kidding, scale effect there. You are not paying for that
half an hour of these I don't know three hundred containers being on, especially
if there's a big pipeline running like you probably like fewer instances too, Like,
yeah, that is money you're not spending. Yeah do it well.
I think there is a direct link from how much you're paying something to how
much energy that use. Sure, Like you're basically eliminating this infrastructure that you
don't need to run. So there are a couple of things you can just
run these machines when you need them when you're running something instead of constantly having
them on. So elasticity elasticity sufficient exactly. That's one thing. The other
thing is write more performing code so you don't need to have them on for
an hour. Maybe you need them just for half an hour, and that
is good for the environment. You're assuming less resources and happens to save you
money exactly. But if you perform the same amount of CPU processing that you
would do in a half an hour, if you do that in five minutes,
you're jacking up the CPU. Are you really saving anything? Maybe?
Yeah. I think that's just what I'm saying is the developers need to think
about not just going faster. But it's really kind of a compute cycle problem.
I like your lambda scenario because typically when I see a spikelad like that,
I've got a big old queue of calls, like there's a bunch of
work that's just come in. We've got a whole bunch of stuff to run,
and it is containers under the hood. We all know that, right,
we just don't have to deal with it lights them up, and to
pump through it as quickly as possible, it's going to light up a lot
of them, but if you've made them more efficient, you'll literally light fewer.
So you know, at the in the end, you're going to see
how many instances it was the same workload, but how many parallel instances did
it need to execute it? And because it was finishing faster, it won't
as lit as many the same one will be reused more like there's real savings
to be had there. I guess that's for a puzzle for everybody to individually
figure out, sure, like how to make things more efficient. Well,
and we played these map reduce games before where it's like, hey, I
can run map reduce on one machine. Don't do that, it's dumb,
but you'll, you know, and it'll take an hour. I can run
on six machines and it'll take twelve minutes. I can run it on sixty
machines and it'll take four minutes. So you know, so what's the environmental
impact run? You're exactly right, like one would argue that six machines was
kind of the efficient middle point where it took less time and the overhead of
the mapping part and the recombining part wasn't as high as over distributing it,
where you know, we may be able to cut the time in half,
but we up the load by five times to make it work. I don't
know if you've thought about this lab, but I know Richard has. Do
you think quantum computing is going to change the equation in terms of sustainability?
And you know in our data centers? Can you think of a quantum data
center what that would look like. I don't know that much about quantum computing,
but but there is an interesting example. My brother, he's a physicist
and he works with I think solid states physics and kind of combination with chemistry
and finding new materials, and this was an interesting thing. I was talking
to him the other day, and what he's trying to do is use machine
learning to find these different to write programs that find these different combinations of materials
that would otherwise be done with quantum computing, which takes a lot of power,
which takes a lot of energy, so mostly in the cooling. Yeah.
So I can't say anything about quantum computers, like how efficient they are?
What are dytaing that there? Are? They exist? Yet? Do
they? I think they kind of do, but they're with a limitations.
I mean, I always look at quantum computers as a class of supercomputer,
which is to say, complex problems that take a long time to stage,
potentially take a long time to process, and then you sort of have to
act on it. They tend to be very deterministic problems like computing airflow over
a wing, those kinds of massively complex computers. General compute, you don't
think that. I don't think there's a generic compute scenario here, just because
it's just the nature of the kind of problem space that it's good at that
you wouldn't use it for anything else. And again, we may not be
able to see that today, just because they are bespoke machines cooled liquid helium
with people in white lab coats taking care of them. And that might transform
at some point, but not anytime soon. Are there any other technologies that
either you can think of coming on the horizon that might make this make the
data center problem a little more efficient? Well, I think a big one,
and I'm going to I'm already to take from your show, No go
ahead, but I'm learning something from an old school hardware geek. As you
know, the move to arm compute on the server is a simplification of CPU
architecture a big simplification of CPU architecture, so reduced instructions, it's only a
reduced instruction set, it's fewer electrons need to move around to get the same
result. The downside of the Intel architecture that lives in a lot of servers
is that it's persistence the nineteen seventies has just been added to and while it's
performant, it is complicated, and so it takes. While it's fast and
we can do the results, it's just not what we do today with the
resource that we have. It's jumping forward through more hoops than it needs.
It's a little brute force, isn't it. It's just because it's old,
because compatibility was more important, and so maintain that cambility as we kind of
dragged baggage from the eighties with us all the way into the twenty twenties.
Now talk about my latest MacBook. Yeah, the M ones and the M
twos being some of the finest machines ever made. So when you say and
the battery lasts forever and and well, and that chip is an incredibly large
chip, it's not actually that complex a chip. Because the ARM architecture simpler,
they have room to include a GPU, include an NPU, include more
memory, all things that make it perform better. So we're starting to see
a push towards ARMS insert in the server clausets and in the cloud. And
I think you're going to talk about double digit decreases in energy consumption for the
same results. Wow. And I think that's a good point. Like Pentium
is now talking like working on chips that are low consumption. They're no longer
saying when marketing, like even Apple with their chips, they no longer saying
this is super fast and performance, like how fast do we need? Like
you know, like we're it's fast enough. We are now in a world
where it's like this is more sustainable battery will like it will use less energy.
So it's not just us like Apple, like all of these companies are
also marketing on this. When you're right that like ARMS pitch has always been
batter efficiency, those M ones and M two's all day battery in your laptop
and it's not a big battery. The idea that you put it into server
because literally be a less kilootts is just another level of the same thinking.
So we should be able to get there MEAs you're cool well, inevitably because
you're literally moving the electrons around less, the pipelines aren't as complicated as not
as many instruction sets, and in the end, all that heat comes from
vibrating electrons. Well, there you go, So we don't have to fix
our code. We're fine. Just you know, dot net CLR will automatically
compile onto ARM and we're going to get the computer results you want. I
think there is also another lens to it, like we are using all of
these programs hopefully to bring some value. So what problems are they're solving,
Like when we're talking about machine learning, when we are talking about quantum computing,
when we are talking about any software that we develop, what or even
AI and crypto like non crypto like by blockchain, and like this distributed system
is like what problems are we solving? How much energy they use might be
okay if we are thinking about the problems that we are solving, and maybe
those problems would be using even more energy if you're not doing this. So
I think we need to kind of look at the bigger picture, not in
the like in smaller isolation, this is using x y z amount of energy.
It's like, what is that replacing. Yeah, it's and the trick
is a comparison because they're not going to be easy comparison. Now, guys,
I'm going to ask you to pause a moment for these very important messages.
And we're it's Dot at Rocks. I'm Carl Franklin, that's my friend
Richard Campbell, and we're talking to Leah Maladiger. Yes, I got it
right again about sustainable computing. And like you know, there's so many topics
subtopics under here, but we're going for the big one, which is data
centers, or at least that's what we have been talking about. Yes,
writting more efficient code is important too, but after the data center problem,
what's number two on your list? Well, it's in his data centers where
we run our code. So these hyper scalers like AWS, Google, like
Microsoft. I think it's it's really just just thinking about it, Like we
need to start talking about this. I wonder if we can start getting the
instrumentation where I am talking about, you know, watts per transaction, we
can also be talking about that greenwashing that you mentioned earlier, Richard, and
I think that's a big pain. I think with anything that we do,
that's a big pain, like because people stop trusting the numbers and their impact.
If all of these companies are scamming in a way, let's go with
that way, because then you stop trusting it. And even if okay,
if we're thinking about where we run our software, how we write our software,
and how performing it is, we can't reduce it to zero, right
like we would stop living or we would not write anything, and that's the
best thing for planet. But I don't know if that's true. But yeah,
okay, but you know, like we can't do that. So like
it's also offsetting, and there is a lot of greenwashing there as well.
So I think our next step is as well, kind of removing the fog
around all of that or trying to figure out creating more transparency, more transparency
maybe standards. Like it's electricity, right, like we know how to calculate
the electricity, but looking at the environmental impact of it given electrical sources challenging.
It depends on what you're using. I mean, I've had a chance
to tour the Quincy Data Center in eastern Washington, which you're really test sites
for Azure, but they're powered by hydro electric power, which is about as
green as you're going to get. You know, it's not like hydraulic power
doesn't have environmental consequences. You do flood a valley and a bunch of plant
life goes underwater, and other things like, there are consequences. Yeah,
whatever happened to that whole? You know, let's put a data center underwater.
You know what? Funny thing speaking of green washing or whatever, I
talked. I talked to Mark Rasinovich about that on run As a while back
in the build time frame, and we talked about Project Natick, which was
this test of putting essentially racks in a metal cylinder under the ocean. To
do they take a shipping container, put all the servers in it, have
it water cooled, boom, it's a it's a pressure vessel, so it's
cylindrical, and they tested in the orkneys and so forth. But in the
end it came down to data sovereignty controls, like just being able to protect
the machines, so uh, like who owns it? Well, not only
who owns it, who has access to it? Like one of the problems
with it being underwater is you don't know if people are approaching it. We've
noticed, but we're living in a world lately was a few bad state actors
out there. This is exactly what Sinners was talking about. It's like,
you know, we like, we like our big buildings made of concrete with
big fences around them, and and you know, strict controls on access,
and you can't do that when it's sitting at the bottom of bey in a
city. So they in the end it became improuctial. The only thing they
show that one of the things that came out of that was really interesting is
that the hardware lasted longer when the environment was completely undisturbed, that the machine
failure rates were actually lower because has nobody walked by them because they were in
a middle cylinder run of the ocean. So did you ever hear about Subsea
Cloud. That was another company that planned to have a commercially available under sea
data center opering off the U operating off the US coast before the end of
twenty twenty two. Yeah, I don't think it made it. That didn't
happen apparently, No, an, I think you get back to the same
old problem. It costs more and it's questionable safety. Yeah, right,
Like the ocean is a dangerous place, sure, and in a secretive place,
So I think it's problematic. Overall, there was a bunch of benefits
to it, without a doubt. I mean it was the logical thing was
you were going to be able to put them closer to cities where the latensy
be low in a space that it would be inexpensive. Yeah, but there
are unusual regulations when you get into the water that are hard to deal with.
Yeah, and most importantly, you don't have direct control over everything.
Well, probably the worst place to put a data center is above ground,
isn't that? Well? Where else are you going to put it underground?
Yeah? Yeah, as long as you can control the space around it,
right, and they certainly you get more heat management that way. I think
you see a lot of organizations talking a lot about where they're getting power from
and how they're cooling, I mean, the two big energy consumers, and
for the most part, like I want to this seems to be the logical
thing for us to do is we pick the provider whose greens, whose green
approaches are appropriate. I suspect they're all going to be the same ultimately,
and they all have a certain amount of green washing in them. I just
and we need to fight against it. Like I'm not saying it's acceptable,
just that's like part of our responsibility going you know this part where you're buying
all these carbon offsets because he didn't actually say what you're going to do,
which was have no carbon output on this, like stop it, stop emitting
carbon on it. But that's the thing, like, as we care more
about this, as we care more about the environment, we are choosing those
providers yea. And at the end we'll stop choosing those that we don't trust
or that are not doing a good thing. Whatever we define that that could
think is, or whatever the values are and standards are. I think we'll
get better. I think we just at the moment trying a lot of different
things, and people are putting the numbers or ratings that that would make them
look better. I think that's important. It is interesting to weigh the price
of building ultra efficient code that will consume as little energy as possible versus the
maintainability of that code. Yes, my experience with making highly optimized code is
it's harder to take care of the simplest code is the best code for maintainability,
even if it is going to consume more energy In the process. There
is always a balance, right, I think we sway too much in the
direction of we want to scale, we want to face. We don't care
about how we write the code. I mean, honestly, I don't think
people are thinking about this for the most part. Yeah, I get that,
And I think the first steps are to start talking about it, get
the data on like what are you doing where you are? Because most of
this is we can do loads of stuff, and I think we should do
loads of stuff now at the beginning. When we don't know what's the right
thing, we should experiment, we should learn from it. But it's mostly
to get the data. I know what brings the most value. Yeah,
Starting to measure, just measure, Yeah, I mean data and metrics.
It's another thing to add to these storages that don't impact the environment in a
good way. Ye. Measuring is also a consumption of exactly, but at
least we can make an informed decision on what we are doing. The thing
that we need to be mindful about is that we shouldn't wait to get something.
We should all start thinking about it and do something about it. Because
I don't think there's going to be a perfect solution, but nobody's perfect.
No solution will be perfect. It's a moving target, moving it target.
But everything is. This is a complex topic that we need to solve and
at some point we will have better data, we will have more information on
what is, you know, like going to make it all better or which
direction we want to go in, and there's going to be a couple of
options. But at the moment, let's just trial. Let's do something.
I mean, I think the easiest thing I can get by a senior leadership
is this, we have a SaaS offering, and I can reduce the cost
of as offering a SaaS offering for the same set of customers. So effectively,
we're going to make more money off of its existing customers by making this
code more efficient. And if you want to then do a little green marketing
on the back of we make our code more efficient to reduce our impact on
the planet. That fine you know up to you, Yes, there is
that thing where we need to be able to know how to present this,
how which value this brings. There is also that thing you want to work
for the company that wants to do good and if they are not, they
don't understand what that means. You want to explain them. But if they
don't get it, and if they don't want to do it, find another
job. Like we are spending. Are we going to get to that point
where it's like I can't work here because you don't care about these things?
I mean, that's interesting to me. It is, no, if it's
true, but well, there is an interesting not interesting. There is a
phrase that I was reminded by recently by my CEO, and it was every
dollar you choose to spend is a vote for the future you want to live
in. Exactly. I think that's fair. And arguably the pandemic has made
us more aware of the culture we want to be in, and a culture
of an organization that takes environmental impact seriously is maybe a culture you want to
be a part of. So that does affect your choice of where you want
to work. Yes, I think we shape it right. I think we
choose and if our employees are not willing or don't care about it, they
need to start because people will not want to live, we will not want
to work there. No, it's a signal about culture. It's a signal,
and it's a singal we want to do something right and Okay, That's
one go is like they will not be able to get software engineers good software.
The other thing is like these vendors like they'll not be able to get
the clients, or the government will say like they will be they will start
charging you on your environmental impacts. That's the other thing. It's interesting to
get to a point where it's like, can we get ratings on our software
for environmental impact? I don't think that idea. It doesn't exist at this
point obviously, but you know, we've certainly talked about other rating systems for
quality. Yeah, and so you know, could there be one that measures
this as well? I mean absolutely, you know, it's interesting just how
unmeasured our industry is that And again I think the clouds so sort of work
around to this is the byproduct of cloud is and now we've now concentrated that
responsibility down to a few organizations that we can press against for better or worse.
I think there's a client conversation here too. I saw the EUS talking
more about the maintainability of smartphones. You already said this earli earlier. This
is like do you really need more compute? It's like do I need another
camera in my phone? I think three is enough. Right. The main
thing, the main reason on replaced phones these days is because the battery is
starting to fail because batteries aren't replaceable. And now you see the EU coming
up with going back to we used to have changeable batteries, right, and
does it could you tolerate a millimeter thicker on your phone? But every few
years now you're going to be able to take the old battery out, have
it recycled, and get a new battery for your phone and can use it
for longer. Well, certainly Apple doesn't want that do that because they can't
sell you a new phone. Well, and I'm not just gonna lay that
at the feet of Apple any All manufacturers are in the business of selling you
do devices, Samson. But the cadence is decreasing, right even you know,
people aren't getting every new iPhone and maybe they're getting every other. Certainly
over an enterprise land we're talking about keeping workstations. Used to be two years,
then it was four years. Now we're talking five and six years.
Because a they're good enough, like it's not like the employees productivity is impaired.
The only reason that at five or six years we start wanting to swap
out the machines is we start having more problems with them. I had my
last workstation for over ten years, Yeah, over ten and this new one
is gonna last me a long time too. They either the last set of
servers I had when I had a server closet, because I don't have one
anymore, and I'm not unhappy about that. That's greenwashing right there, right
there. But that set of servers. Twice I changed out all the hard
drives on all the fans in it. Like the motherboards were good enough and
there's nothing wrong with the chassis, but eventually the bearings on the fans start
to go, and that will kill a machine as it stops pumping air through.
Well. Well, I have thirty two solar panels on my roof,
so I feel pretty smug right now. But again, we're thinking about in
terms of when we reduce impact, when we maintain equipment for longer, and
there does seem to be a general sense that a lot of these devices are
sufficiently performed. We don't need to replace them to get anything from that,
but they should be more repaarable. Yes, I really hope we're going in
that direction because I mean we are a consumer, how do you say,
like consumed? Yes, yeah, we have been trained by a system that
profits from us consuming constantly. Exactly if we're consuming constantly, we want everything
Like you go on Amazon and you order things immediately, clothes, gadgets,
everything is I just want it now. It doesn't need to be good quality
because I'm going to to be good. I'm going to get bored of it
in the month. And this is the thing, like these companies that that
produce these things that are not incentivized to make it no last longer, and
that's what you get. You end up with like EU regulations saying, well,
they forced iPhone to use the USB C port and it's not like they
couldn't do it, and there was much acclaim from everyone. And now they've
also said stop shipping chargers with the phone because we've got enough chargers, like
I had enough cables at home. Story for you. So my second marriage
I inherited two step daughters and they're wonderful bonus daughters. But at one point
one of them came and said, Mom, are we broke? And she
goes, no, why, It says, because I haven't seen any Amazon
boxes on the front porch in like two weeks. Yeah, cold border something.
Yeah. We are just used to having everything now and the world is
getting complicated, you know, like all of this stuff, all of these
frameworks or everything, you know, like run this shiplogs there. I want
to filter on this. We talked about observability yesterday. That's more data.
That's more you know, Like, I'm not saying any of that is bad.
I'm just saying what is the value that that's bringing? What are problems
are we solving with that? But you hit an interesting point. It's like
there's an awful lot of consumption going on without assessing the value from it exactly.
It's like, if you're going to do that level of logging, tell
me you look at the lot. Yeah, why are you using them?
Is it? Just like first of all, like do you need it?
What's the problem you're trying to solve? The other then is like what's the
tool for the job? And this is the thing? Like is then the
machine learning? Is it? This AI? Is it? Can you run
this during the night when energy consumption is lower? Can you run it in
a region where we have greener energy? Sure? Yeah, that's an interesting
idea that we shift workloads, time and geography for lower impact. Again,
I don't know how much consideration that is right there, but it's an interesting
question to ask, like these are not those are not stunningly hard problems.
No, if you had the numbers in front of you, Yeah, I
think there are different ways. It's just we do need to start talking about
them. Sure, we need to start making it easier for people to do
them. Yeah, make the path the path of least resistance is also a
path of optimal outcome. Yeah, I buy it. It's an interesting conversation
to have and to kick upstairs. Yes, you know, to take to
leadership and say where does this fit into our conversations? Like how are we
thinking about this? And again I'm as someone who's had to convince leaders to
do things for many years. It's like, come with a dollar for They
understand that absolutely. I mean, you need to speak with the language of
the people you're talking to, So you need to know your audience. So
what triggers I can make the CFO happy and the CEO happy at the same
time. I've been I can really tell you that, like infant ofs,
we made this platform greener by accidents at early stages and this was just because
we were trying to not just because one of our problems was we couldn't scale
with the client sizes and the hardware is just too expensive. So by trying
to reduce the cost, we actually made the platform greener. Scale it up,
scale it down when you're not using it, distributed in a different way,
like those different things. But that's the language that our CFO understands.
It's cheaper, it was cheap, it should be cheaper. That's awesome.
So what's next for you? What's in your inbox? What's next for me?
Well, with fund ups, I'm lucky to work in a company that
actually cares about this, that does want to make a good impact and not
just profit. And we just rearc that our platform, yeah, to be
able to support our clients, but also make it cheaper and greener. The
next thing is for us are making that code more performance, figuring the ways
to maybe use those machines that have lower energy consumption arm processors. Yes,
as I actually come online, but it's an interesting question to kick to a
Microsoft to say, tell me which is your greenest data center, Like do
you ue the track of that where the power comes from, how the cooling
is done. There was a talk yesterday and this guy showed, like in
parasites this much impact on the environment, like in Ireland, the data centers
have this much impact. In Germany. You could be choosing and scaling up
and scaling down servers depending where the energy is greener, where the consumption is
better or lower. Like if you look at Canada like fires and you need
water and we are cooling down these data centers with this enormous amount of water,
if you can kind of switch that somewhere else now and then you know,
like I think we can be smooth smarter about this. You can push
for value in that. Yeah, I like that. Leah, thanks so
much for joining us. It's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you
very much for Yeah, I'm making this a very enjoyable talk, all right,
and we'll see you next time on dot net rocks. Dot net Rocks
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