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Ask HN: What jobs can a software engineer take to tackle climate change?

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31–40 of 77 posts

Re: Ask HN: What jobs can a software engineer take to tackle climate change?

#31
In terms of software engineering alone, your best bet may just be to find an organization you support and work hard while under their employ. Even if you're not _directly_ affecting emissions etc., you're supporting those who do. As a bonus, passion for a cause can be very motivational. (Though keep in mind you may be discouraged if the organization feels dysfunctional or ineffective. Be ready to switch jobs if need be.)

As for finding those organizations, that's a different question and may be better asked without reference to software engineering so as to receive the widest spectrum of orgs.

Re: Ask HN: What jobs can a software engineer take to tackle climate change?

#32
There are so many startups in that space. Smart grid management, drones to support wind turbines maintenance, robots that clean solar panels (yes, that is a thing https://www.ecoppia.com/), water leakage alerts using smart valves, all the alternative meat wannabes, vertical farming? (questionable...), the list goes on and on. There are VC funds investing solely in these things. Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: What jobs can a software engineer take to tackle climate change?

#33
The web is not very green or very accessible. Every bloated web page requires a lot of electrons to be moved around.

Recently the web has evolved with CSS Grid and this means that you no longer need to have web pages made of 'div soup' with every 'div' using half a dozen non-semantic class attributes.

It is extremely rare for a web page to be 10% or higher in actual content, if you look at the actual document and don't even consider the images/scripts/stylesheets. Most of the web could be at the 33% mark if you strip the presentational markup away and just use HTML5 elements, styling them with CSS Grid. The benefits of writing this way are many, apart from being green, such a page is accessible because useful elements are used for the page, e.g. 'nav' instead of 'div', and easier to maintain, because the content is kept simple. There is also SEO benefit from having a quicker to download page that is a fraction of the size.

Now you may scoff at saving a few bytes from a few web pages but the savings add up, get one template right for a website that gets used by a few million people on a daily basis and you are suddenly saving gigabytes. People's phone batteries last longer, cell towers don't have to do as much work, server rooms can run cooler, it is a bigger win than people think.

Once upon a time we thought nothing of single use food containers or excess packaging, the humble 'div' with its framework class attributes double-wrapping every block of content on the page with a few 'span' elements thrown in for good measure is possibly more wasteful, at least you can reuse plastic bags, you can't reuse a 'div' that has been beamed across the airwaves from the far side of the globe.

There are laws coming along meaning that web pages have to be accessible. You can make them accessible in a lip service way or re-write them with maintainable, CSS-Grid styled HTML5 to deliver a first class accessible experience. In the EU there is a two year period for the public sector to get their act together on this.

Writing HTML without the div where you focus on document structure and use the right elements is very easy, as is using CSS Grid. But we are in an industry where the mindset is to work from a visual mockup and to then paint by numbers gormlessly using the dreadful div element that has no place in modern HTML and very much goes against the 'separation of concerns'.

The world needs someone to teach a new intake of web developers how to write actual HTML, leaving the build tools and hacks far behind, more of a focus on the written word rather than the overly complex tech.

We have had revolutions in web design, for instance 'responsive' was a thing. If we can have actual HTML instead of bloated presentational markup then there will be some old timers who won't get it, but this easier way should be well received. Right now though dev teams are very much geared up for over complicating projects and not even thinking to use just the HTML5 elements in a content first type of way. Hierarchies of teams are built around anachronistic 'agile' processes that are doomed to result in bloated div websites.

Unless there is nuclear war then we are not going back on the web, it is here to stay and be improved on. Be that improvement. Teach people how to write web pages the easy way, enable others to think differently and not be using tired Stack Overflow 'div' solutions that were okay a decade ago.

The maths of the CO2 saving is not easy to work out. But then it is. HTML is the language of the web and web pages are what we read. This page you are reading right now is HTML and not some JSON stringified thing. Coding the lean HTML5 way does get your HTML document size halved, plus the lights don't have to be on as long to write it in the first place.

You can do all of this stuff a lot easier than the stuff you have done thus far. I don't think your skill set is in 'planting trees'. Nobody is looking for 'green HTML developers' but there is this legislative requirement for accessible HTML. Start selling yourself to them.

Re: Ask HN: What jobs can a software engineer take to tackle climate change?

#34
post #17
post #12

A parent - and raise your child(ren) to live in an ecologically sensitive manner that you wish the rest of the world to be. (Am being honest, not being snarky)

Surely not being a parent is friendlier to the environment :-)

I believe so on average, but for individuals it depends on the impact your kids have :-)

Re: Ask HN: What jobs can a software engineer take to tackle climate change?

#35

Can we cut the constant climate change topics? For the last three or four weeks I haven't been able to swing a dead cat without hitting somebody going into histrionics about the end being nigh because humans or cow farts are destroying the planet.

>god can people stop being so hysterical about literally the most important existential crisis of today

Re: Ask HN: What jobs can a software engineer take to tackle climate change?

#36
post #29

Slightly adjacent to your question, but I've thought it would be nice to have a Google Maps-like app that optimizes for fuel use instead of drive time or distance.

If there are any Googlers reading: I'd love if Maps implemented this. Helpful for saving people some cash, too, which I am sure would be popular! As it is I have to consider distance, time spent, hilliness, speed limits (to limit wind resistance), and amount of stop & go, then guesstimate.

Re: Ask HN: What jobs can a software engineer take to tackle climate change?

#38

I'd say from long experience of being ignored when trying to do this and similar stuff, the best payoff is to push it upstairs to those in power, the politicians, who doubtless have many other things to do, but whose job it basically is. Your job is to tackle stuff on an individual level, yourself and your family perhaps, but theirs is to deal with things on a societal level where there is much greater effectiveness.…

Totally agree with both points. I came to the conclusion that liquid democracy could bring about political change more rapidly than any other “movement”, so I built this: https://liquidcenter.org Unfortunately, Sybil-resistant online identification is still a really hard problem to solve.

Re: Ask HN: What jobs can a software engineer take to tackle climate change?

#39

Good luck on that but if you really want to do something, join an organization, protest, etc. We need political power more than we need software right now.

I've tried building software to organize activists to use shareholder rights -- those things you don't realize you already have through your retirement funds. E.g. https://www.yourstake.org/ask/vanguard-vanguard-endorse-a-na...

Re: Ask HN: What jobs can a software engineer take to tackle climate change?

#40
I've started developing an idea for a kickstarter-like platform to document, socialize and (forgive me) gamify individual actions towards climate change improvements. If we could get a certain percentage of populations to change some basics in their lives, and influence governmental policy in kind, we could take more responsibility for our own impacts, and our collective contributions.

Very nascent, researching and blue-sky-ing, but I'm just putting it out there for anyone who might like to discuss this.

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