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The Efficiency Paradox - How to Save Yourself and the World

GOTO Conferences via YouTube

Overview

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Explore the complex relationship between efficiency and sustainability in this 57-minute conference talk from YOW! Australia 2024, where Holly Cummins, Senior Principal Software Engineer on the Red Hat Quarkus Team, examines how inefficiency damages our planet while paradoxically, excessive efficiency can harm both human happiness and actual productivity. Learn about the environmental impact of software waste, including zombie servers and e-waste, and discover practical solutions like LightSwitchOps and faster code optimization techniques. Dive into a detailed case study of the Quarkus Java framework, which demonstrates waste-reduction techniques that benefit both machine performance and developer productivity by addressing Java dynamism challenges. Understand how to identify and eliminate software waste through examples involving logging and Hibernate optimization, while exploring the concept of developer joy as a crucial factor in sustainable software development. Examine the counterintuitive principle that 100% utilization is unsustainable for both humans and systems, drawing insights from brain science research on the default mode network, business studies, and queueing theory to understand why achieving more sometimes requires doing less. Investigate Jevons' paradox and its implications for efficiency gains, learn about the critical value of slack in systems and human productivity, and discover how idle minds contribute to solving complex problems. Gain practical knowledge about building green software, carbon efficiency strategies, and sustainable architecture principles while understanding the balance between speed and resiliency in modern software systems.

Syllabus

00:00 Intro
03:01 Waste
05:41 e-waste is killing the planet
08:39 Zombie servers
09:32 Data
11:10 Solution: LightSwitchOps
15:36 Solution: Faster code
19:23 Case study: Quarkus
21:29 Java dynamism
24:13 How do we fix all this?
27:18 Example: Logging
27:59 Example: Hibernate
28:23 Developer joy
33:29 We have a solution
36:05 How efficient can we get?
36:37 Speed vs Resiliency
39:09 Jevon's paradox
43:08 The value slack
44:22 Australians are laid back?
46:52 Idle minds can solve hard problems
53:37 Efficiency
55:15 Conclusions
57:00 Outro

Taught by

GOTO Conferences

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