Hi all! I'm a software engineer and I’ve been getting more interested in the environmental impact of the software we build and the energy it takes to keep the internet running. It’s one of those topics that feels invisible most of the time, yet the numbers are… surprisingly big.
I recently recorded a conversation with Thibaud Colas, who works on Wagtail and Django and has been pushing for more awareness around digital sustainability. We talked about how much energy the web actually uses, how we can measure it, why performance ends up being an emissions issue, whether rewriting everything in Rust is the magic fix (spoiler: not really), and what kind of accountability we should expect from AI companies and cloud providers.
For anyone here working in software, web performance, or digital strategy, I think a lot of what he shared is genuinely useful.
If you’re curious, I'm posting the link to the episode below. Happy to hear thoughts, feedback, or other perspectives from folks in this community!
How much energy does the internet use? A conversation about digital sustainability
byu/miabajic inenergy
by miabajic