Sustainability, DevRel, and the Power of Being 'Just a Few Steps Ahead’
A few years ago when I gave my first conference talk as a graduate engineer, I never expected it to out-perform talks from principal engineers. But when it did, it taught me something crucial about influence in tech.
I’ve been a software engineer for the past four and a half years. But during that time, I’ve also been an advocate for reducing the carbon footprint of software. As a fresh-eyed graduate engineer, I spoke at an internal company technology conference alongside senior, lead, and principal engineers. My talk got the most engagement of the whole conference, despite myself having barely any experience in the industry. It sparked an exciting journey of learning and advocacy into how we can optimise the benefits of software while minimising software’s impact on the environment.
In 2021, the Green Software Foundation had only just been founded and there was barely anyone (that I could find during my many hours of research!) talking about the topic. But it was growing rapidly. Today the sustainability concerns of software, most particularly with AI, are often discussed in mainstream media.
Over the past few years I’ve dug a lot deeper into this space, giving various talks and creating a green software community at my own company. Here’s what I’ve learned so far about how to bridge the gap between software and sustainability, while being relatable to other developers.
You don’t have to be the expert
Last year I was invited onto Gaël Duez’s incredible sustainable IT podcast, Green IO. I’d been listening to his podcast for a while, with many of his guests being people at the top of their fields, with incredible achievements in sustainable computing to their name.
In comparison, I was still a relatively young engineer doing small-scale work within my company. On Gaël’s and my first call to chat about the podcast, he shared he was very excited to have me on, and that he had been searching for people like me for a while. I was a bit confused and shared my feelings about how in comparison I didn’t feel as qualified. His response? Being younger, less experienced and working down in the detail as an individual contributor made me more relatable to more of his listeners. This relatability could help more people take the first step in their own company.
I’ve experienced similar things myself when I’ve wanted to pick up a new hobby or skill and searched for advice on how to get started. I often end up following someone like me who’s started recently and is a few steps ahead of me in their journey as their content feels more accessible to me. And maybe more trustworthy too?
This has taught me to think about how you are positioning yourself relative to your audience. Like my first talk as a graduate engineer, you don’t always have to be the person with years of experience over your audience. Being on the journey with them might just be more accessible and lead to more engagement.
2. Reducing friction
Asking developers to add another thing to their to do list is a hard sell. The optimist in me initially thought that because I was asking people to do things that would help reduce their carbon footprint, it would be easy to get people involved.
Many people want to learn about sustainability in software. They’re curious, they’re asking questions. But the friction occurs when moving to the actual doing part and getting people to spend time in their day doing an additional task. A company might be sustainability conscious, but often extra work gets put at the bottom of the backlog - and there is always something else to do before you get to the bottom of the backlog.
I found the easiest way was to start with the individual developers. They’ve got to meet the demands of people higher up in management, but they are still really interested in sustainability. So how do you get them started in the easiest possible way? Like ‘this will take five minutes and then you don’t have to think about’ way.
I asked people to go to our internal carbon footprint monitoring tool, type in their team name, and take a screenshot of the output. Put that screenshot somewhere visible, like a stakeholder review meeting, an operational health meeting and let people get used to seeing it and starting conversations around it.
Soon, that practice becomes just another ‘boring metric’ that your team looks at. From there, you can continue to build in new practices to your day-to-day. I have some more ideas in my post ‘How to create a green sofware culture at your company’.
3. Embracing and leaning into my strengths
I’m fascinated by human connection, and what makes someone a good communicator. There are many role models out there. You might look at a leader or a speaker you admire who is great at injecting humour into anything they do. But when you try to do the same, it falls flat. I’ve been learning to embrace my natural strengths when communicating.
This has helped with understanding my strengths in connecting with people, and building my own natural way of leading with impact. Understanding what my strengths are around communication - for me, that is making people feel heard and understood, making them feel good in my presence by showing curiosity and interest in what they do.
Other people’s strengths might be being amazing at bringing humour to their talks and content, or others are naturally great at telling a captivating story, no matter how mundane it is.
I think about “how can I make this person feel excited and enjoy their interaction with me so much that they want to be involved in what I’m doing?”
I would love to hear your thoughts on developer relations and how we can bring more green software practices into companies. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn, I’m always up for a chat!
