Back in 2021, Intel’s Software Engineering Organization formed a dedicated team to lead green software research and initiatives, with the goal of driving sustainable practices across the company. Although the team was disbanded, the three of us who remained — a couple of rockstar developers and a UX Unicorn — continued to champion green software as a passion project.
One of the projects we pursued involved calculating the carbon footprint of CICD pipelines and estimating the energy consumption of different parts of the software stack.
In today’s eco-conscious world, we believe that integrating sustainability into software development isn’t just a nice-to-have it’s essential. Our mission is to help software developers minimize their carbon footprint while optimizing their processes. Together, we brainstormed, created a list of ideas, and brought them to life through a video demo showing what GitHub could look like with green features and capabilities.
Tristin Oldani | LinkedIn
Paz Barda | LinkedIn
Akshaya Jagannadharao | LinkedIn
Overview: We propose adding badges to project READMEs that display estimated carbon usage, as calculated by GitHub. These badges will provide visibility into the environmental impact of the repository, encouraging developers to be mindful of their code’s energy consumption.
Benefit: This initiative increases awareness and promotes environmentally responsible coding practices among developers.
Pops of green highlights and a carbon badge indicate this repo has enabled the green features within GitHub
Overview: Continuing the bring awareness providing an option to display the carbon impacts and any savings repositories gain from CodeRecylcing.
Benefit: This initiative continues to increase awareness and promotes environmentally responsible coding practices among developers.
Providing a way for users to select to highlight and add their carbon impact to their repository homepage
Overview: Introducing a dedicated “Carbon Usage” tab in GitHub Insights will allow users to track and visualize the carbon emissions associated with various activities, such as code commits, CI/CD pipelines, and deployments.
Benefit: By providing detailed data on carbon usage, teams can make informed decisions to optimize their workflows for reduced energy consumption.
Overview: This feature will estimate the carbon savings achieved by reusing existing code/3rd party libraries instead of developing new solutions from scratch. It will highlight the positive environmental impact of leveraging open-source libraries and shared code.
Benefit: Encouraging code reuse not only boosts development efficiency but also significantly reduces carbon emissions.
Adding a "Carbon Impact" tab to the Insights section of GitHub allows for the traceabilty of the impact of various parts of the repo along with the savings of recycled code.
Leveraging GitHub app for deep integration with GitHub:
- Create and update widgets (visualziations)
- GitHub GraphQL API for dependencies between repositories (for CodeReCycles)
Leverage EcoCI capabilities, integrated in user workflows
- https://github.com/green-coding-solutions/eco-ci-energy-estimation
- https://www.green-coding.io/projects/eco-ci/
