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Beyond the Hype: How Performance, Sustainability, and Ethics are Redefining Software’s Future 🚀💡
QCON London is the place for senior engineers, architects, and technical leaders looking for what’s next in tech. This past March, attendees dove deep into critical topics, including architectures, engineering productivity, and applying AI in the real world. It wasn’t about fleeting trends; it was about gaining practical insights from senior practitioners to make smarter investment decisions with your time and tech resources.
Amidst the rapid pace of software evolution, QCON London empowers you to lead the change. We recently sat down with Erica Pisani, a Senior Software Developer at Flip Financial and the insightful track host for QCON London 2025’s “Performance and Sustainability” track. Erica, who now also serves on the programming committee for QCON London 2026, shared her profound perspective on why these seemingly opposing concepts are, in fact, deeply complementary and ethically essential.
Performance & Sustainability: A Harmonious Duo, Not Opponents 🌿✨
Erica’s vision for the “Performance and Sustainability” track was clear from the start: cover all angles. She meticulously curated five to six talks, ensuring a holistic view. Her core belief, a recurring theme throughout the discussion, is that performance and sustainability are not at odds. Instead, they are quite complimentary.
One critical aspect Erica wanted to highlight was the leadership perspective. Often, the drive for green initiatives comes from grassroots efforts by individual developers. However, she emphasized the need for a leadership mindset that understands and encourages this synergy. Ludy’s talk, “What I wish I knew when I started with Green IT,” perfectly captured this by offering insights into fostering a performance and sustainability culture at an organizational level.
The Ethical AI Frontier: Smaller, Smarter, Fairer 🤖⚖️
AI has dominated tech conversations for years, and Erica knew it needed a central role in the track. She was particularly excited to feature Jade’s work, which challenges the common notion that “bigger is better” when it comes to AI models and Large Language Models (LLMs).
Jade’s research focuses on creating performant, smaller models. This approach isn’t just environmentally beneficial, reducing the significant time, energy, and money involved in building massive LLMs. It also addresses crucial ethical considerations. Jade’s talk delved into how to sustainably acquire high-quality training data and, critically, how to fairly compensate the people who provide it. This is a stark contrast to the well-known practices of popular LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude, which often leverage vast amounts of internet data, leading to lawsuits from writers and publishers.
Erica noted that Jade’s perspective, particularly from a non-Western context, brought a fresh and much-needed take on the biases embedded in internet data, which often heavily skews towards Western, English-speaking, middle-aged male perspectives. The key takeaway: you don’t always need the biggest model, but rather the most accurate one for your specific needs, like NLP for Romanian versus Bulgarian.
Local First: Resilient Software, Greener Footprints 🏠🌐
Another vital angle explored was the burgeoning “local first software movement.” This movement champions increased user privacy, reduced reliance on cloud services, and resilience against network unreliability. Erica, based in a major North American city, acknowledged taking network reliability for granted – a luxury many parts of the world do not share.
Local first software is inherently performant in scenarios with unreliable networks. It also offers a significant environmental benefit. As Erica highlighted from her previous work on edge computing, transmitting data “over the wire” consumes a lot of energy. By minimizing or eliminating this transmission, local first software designs are inherently more sustainable. Here again, performance and sustainability prove to be complementary, not opposing.
Measuring Impact & Challenging Assumptions 📊🧐
A fundamental challenge in moving towards more sustainable software is measurement. As Sarah Sue, co-author of a book on building green software and a well-known figure in the green software movement, emphasized, “You can’t fix what you can’t measure.” Businesses need metrics to track progress towards sustainability goals, just like any other software objective.
Holly’s talk took a systems-level view, challenging common practices like “just take all the data you need because you never know when you’ll need it.” She powerfully demonstrated how such practices are not only inefficient for businesses financially but also carry a massive environmental impact by consuming energy to store vast amounts of data that are never actually used.
The sheer scale of software’s environmental footprint is often underestimated. According to a 2023 report from the Green Software Foundation, the total consumption of the software industry was equal to the transportation industry altogether (planes, trains, ships, etc.). This striking statistic underscores the immense impact of our individual and collective software decisions. Our pursuit of comfort and “nines after the 99” availability comes at a significant environmental cost.
Lessons Learned & Future Horizons: Architecting for a Better Tomorrow 🚀✨
Erica’s biggest takeaway from hosting the track was the palpable excitement among attendees who discovered the green software movement. Many were unaware of its existence but became eager to incorporate its principles into their daily work. Developers realized they don’t always need managerial approval for change; they can make small decisions in design choices and vendor selection that move the needle towards greener, more performant software.
Looking ahead to QCON London 2026, Erica will champion tracks like “Architecting for Resilience” and “Organizations in Flux: Navigating the AI Hype.” She sees direct connections, noting that designing for resilience, like offline-first or distributed systems, inherently aligns with sustainable practices.
Erica also introduced the powerful concept of “ethical debt.” This refers to the consequences of deferring important ethical decisions for immediate growth, leading to an accumulation of environmental waste and other negative impacts. She argues that taking a few minutes to think long-term – “what could this look like in seven years, rather than in the next seven days” – can prevent significant ethical debt and set both software and businesses up for long-term success.
The industry is coming of age. Software developers hold immense power through their daily decisions. The “social technical factor” is crucial; as Erica noted, building a distributed system often means building the team that reflects its architecture, fostering autonomy and responsibility.
Your Role in the Green Software Movement: Get Started Today! 🛠️💚
Erica offered encouraging advice for developers, whether they’re new to the concept or looking for next steps:
- Leverage Available Resources: The Green Software Foundation offers a wealth of information, including a free course through the Linux Foundation covering various aspects of sustainable software.
- Explore Local First Software: Investigate the local first software movement and tools from places like Research Lab Inc. Even if you can’t apply it directly to your legacy system, it can inspire side projects or future architectural proposals.
- Question Assumptions: Don’t blindly apply AI as a “silver bullet.” There are many cases where traditional programming, perhaps assisted by tools like GitHub Copilot or OpenAI Codex, works perfectly well.
- Embrace Craftsmanship: In an era of speed, craftsmanship and thoughtful decision-making are more important than ever. Think about the “one-way doors” – decisions that are hard to reverse – and approach them with care.
- Think Globally, Act Locally: Your small decisions, when scaled across millions of users, have a massive impact. Utilize tools, like JavaScript libraries for carbon usage measurement, to understand your footprint.
Erica’s own “My Local Grocer” project, aimed at mapping independent grocery stores in Toronto to help people avoid monopolies, exemplifies the power of “home-cooked software.” With open data initiatives and accessible tools, even those with less technical backgrounds can now tackle local problems that large VC-backed companies might ignore due to a lack of immediate ROI.
We are a global village, and climate change is a global challenge. By consciously integrating performance, sustainability, and ethics into every architectural decision, we can collectively build a more resilient, responsible, and greener future for software and for our planet.