Panel: What’s next? Net-Zero Commitments?

Sustainability has been deemed the greatest challenge of all time for many generations, yet, we have reached any substantial progress to defeat it. This is true across many industries, including the software sector. This panel invites experts and thought leaders across industries to discuss and explore strategies to measure, reduce and prevent harmful environmental effects of software, specifically how we could accelerate net zero progress across the board.


Speaker

Holly Cummins

Full Stack Engineer, Building Quarkus @Red Hat, Former Lead Consultant

Holly Cummins is a Senior Principal Software Engineer on the Red Hat Quarkus team and a Java Champion. Over her career, Holly has been a full-stack javascript developer, a WebSphere Liberty build architect, a client-facing consultant, a JVM performance engineer, and an innovation leader.  Holly has used the power of cloud to understand climate risks, count fish, help a blind athlete run ultra-marathons in the desert solo, and invent stories (although not at all the same time). She gets worked up about sustainability, technical empathy, extreme programming, the importance of proper testing, and automating all the things. You can find her at http://hollycummins.com, or follow her on socials at @holly_cummins(@hachyderm.io). 

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Speaker

Sara Bergman

Senior Software Engineer @Microsoft

Sara Bergman is a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft Development Center Norway working as a backend engineer with people experiences in the Microsoft eco-system. She is an advocate for green software practices at Microsoft and externally. She is an individual contributor of the Green Software Foundation. Sara is a co-author of "Building Green Software," O'Reilly's new book on the actions the tech industry needs to take to handle the energy transition and build green software.

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Speaker

Adrian Cockcroft

Former VP Amazon Sustainability Architecture @Amazon

Adrian Cockcroft has had a long career working at the leading edge of technology. He’s always been fascinated by what comes next, and he writes and speaks extensively on a range of subjects. He joined Amazon as their VP of Cloud Architecture Strategy in 2016, recruited and leads their open source community engagement team. He was previously a Technology Fellow at Battery Ventures. There he advised the firm and its portfolio companies about technology issues and also assists with deal sourcing and due diligence. Before joining Battery, Adrian helped lead Netflix’s migration to a large scale, highly available public-cloud architecture and the open sourcing of the cloud-native NetflixOSS platform. Prior to that at Netflix he managed a team working on personalization algorithms and service-oriented refactoring. Adrian was a founding member of eBay Research Labs, developing advanced mobile applications and even building his own homebrew phone, years before iPhone and Android launched. As a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems he wrote the best-selling “Sun Performance and Tuning” book and was chief architect for High Performance Technical Computing. He graduated from The City University, London with a Bsc in Applied Physics and Electronics, and was named one of the top leaders in Cloud Computing in 2011 and 2012 by SearchCloudComputing magazine.
 

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Speaker

Sarah Hsu

SRE @Goldman Sachs & Training Project Chair @Green Software Foundation

Sarah is a Site Reliability Engineer at Goldman Sachs. Sarah is working on a distributed platform in Google Cloud that will support the Global Markets' trading business. Sarah started a grassroots effort in GS to tackle sustainability in engineering and is the organisation lead for GS with the Green Software Foundation. Sarah is also the chair of the Principle’s project for the GSF. Recently, the group and the Linux Foundation launched a free online educational course, Green Software for Practitioners (LFC131), to help software practitioners build, run and maintain greener applications. She would like to see green software becoming an integral part of the educational curriculum for anyone learning to code.

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Speaker

From the same track

Session cloud

Cloud Provider Sustainability, Current Status and Future Directions

Wednesday Mar 29 / 01:40PM BST

Cloud providers are large, growing rapidly, and leading sustainable development of datacenters, although their total capacity is still a small proportion of the global datacenter footprint.

Speaker image - Adrian Cockcroft

Adrian Cockcroft

Former VP Amazon Sustainability Architecture @Amazon

Session climate

Can Green Software Engineering Solve the Climate Crisis?

Wednesday Mar 29 / 10:35AM BST

Software has a large carbon footprint and impacts our global commitment to keep global warming to no more than 1.5°C – as called for in the Paris Agreement. To reach this goal, emissions need to be reduced by 45% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050.

Speaker image - Sara Bergman

Sara Bergman

Senior Software Engineer @Microsoft

Session climate

Why Cloud Zombies Are Destroying the Planet and How You Can Stop Them

Wednesday Mar 29 / 11:50AM BST

Wait, zombies? Really? Zombies are servers which aren’t doing useful work. They’re everywhere, costing money, eating electricity, and belching carbon. And they’re useless! So how do we get rid of them?

Speaker image - Holly Cummins

Holly Cummins

Full Stack Engineer, Building Quarkus @Red Hat, Former Lead Consultant

Session language

From Runtime Efficiency to Carbon Efficiency

Wednesday Mar 29 / 04:10PM BST

Goldman Sachs’s proprietary language, Slang, is a core technology responsible for booking trades, quoting prices and analysing risk, among many other use cases. Therefore, Slang requires a lot of computing power to support GS’s Global Markets Business.

Speaker image - Michal Dorko

Michal Dorko

Software Engineer @GoldmanSachs