throwaway03678

You could start with reducing energy requirements. It may not do much individually, unless you are Meta, but it will show others that it is actually possible to produce leaner software. As a group, developers actually have the potential to make significant impact in energy usage (both good and bad)

Examples:

- Reduce complexity in frontend apps. Run less Javascript and animations in the frontend to save your users' phone batteries.

- Reduce unnecessary use of AI that requires CPU intensive use. Some use this just to tick off a box to attract more VCs

- Running huge Kubernetes clusters that are barely utilized.

- Do you need to run a full QA/test environment while you sleep, or could you fire it up when you actually need it?

- Choose options that may require more work, but reduce the CPU cycles (like replacing Electron with native code)

- Blockchain/Bitcoin/NFT have been used for software that doesn't really need it.

- Do we really need that many micro services? One drawback of micro services is that you need to fire up more instances and also additional infrastructure (load balancers, network traffic, separate databases and message queues for inter-service communication)