Green Tech

The private sector is increasingly investing in green technologies and sustainability. With large infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Google pursuing aggressive sustainability goals, startups providing tools to measure carbon emissions, innovation in clean energy and transportation, and much more, we see technology play an increasingly large role in combating climate change. 

In this track, we explore how companies are contributing to sustainability. Key areas of focus include measuring carbon footprint, decarbonizing the products we produce, and how we as software engineers can reduce the overall climate impact of the things we build. Finally, this track looks ahead to how technology can create a better future for the generations to follow.


From this track

Session Green Tech

DevSusOps - Bringing Sustainability Concerns to Development and Operations

Tuesday Oct 25 / 10:35AM PDT

Introducing the track, this talk will define terminology and introduce the mental models needed to make sense of sustainability as a non-functional requirement for developing and operating systems.

Speaker image - Adrian Cockcroft
Adrian Cockcroft

Former VP Amazon Sustainability Architecture @Amazon, previously @Netflix, founding member of eBay Research Labs, distinguished engineer @SunMicrosystems

Session Green Tech

The Zen of Green Software: Finding Balance in the Sustainable Growth Journey

Tuesday Oct 25 / 11:50AM PDT

As businesses continue to evolve their operations to meet consumer demands and remain profitable, reliance on the IT sector will only grow. Today, it’s estimated that this sector contributes around 3% of global CO2 emissions, on par with the aviation industry.

Speaker image - Lisa McNally
Lisa McNally

Head of Cleantech & Sustainability @Thoughtworks

Speaker image - Marco Valtas
Marco Valtas

Technical Lead for Cleantech and Sustainability @Thoughtworks

Session Green Tech

Efficient Language and Library Use to Reduce Carbon

Tuesday Oct 25 / 01:40PM PDT

Rust is a younger systems programming language that can have small memory footprint, low CPU utilization, offer low latencies and have small application sizes.

Speaker image - Esteban Küber
Esteban Küber

Principal Software Engineer @Amazon

Session Green Tech

Tesla's Virtual Power Plant

Tuesday Oct 25 / 02:55PM PDT

The Tesla Energy Platform uses software to give control to customers and utilities when unexpected events happen, such as grid outages, severe weather events, or energy demand peaks.

Speaker image - Hector Veiga Ortiz
Hector Veiga Ortiz

Staff Distributed Systems Engineer @Tesla Energy Cloud Platform

Speaker image - Natalie DellaMaria
Natalie DellaMaria

Senior Distributed Systems Engineer @Tesla Energy Cloud Platform

Session

Panel: DevSusOps

Tuesday Oct 25 / 04:10PM PDT

Many have called sustainability the challenge of our lifetime. The DevSusOps Panel pulls together expert practitioners at the very forefront of sustainability thought leadership for a practical conversation about what's happening in the space today.

Speaker image - Marco Valtas
Marco Valtas

Technical Lead for Cleantech and Sustainability @Thoughtworks

Speaker image - Esteban Küber
Esteban Küber

Principal Software Engineer @Amazon

Session

Unconference: Green Tech

Tuesday Oct 25 / 05:25PM PDT

What is an unconference? At QCon SF, we’ll have unconferences in most of our tracks.

Speaker image - Shane Hastie
Shane Hastie

Global Delivery Lead for SoftEd and Lead Editor for Culture & Methods at InfoQ.com

Track Host

Adrian Cockcroft

Former VP Amazon Sustainability Architecture @Amazon, previously @Netflix, founding member of eBay Research Labs, distinguished engineer @SunMicrosystems

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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