Commit message: Sustainable IT to engineer with purpose

Your purpose is your personal mission; the expression of your core values. You live out that purpose by engaging in activities that advance your mission and reflect your values, such as working on projects you believe will make the world a better place.

However, in the corporate world, you’re not always working on something with an obvious ‘higher purpose’. Yes – it might feel like you’re working to make certain things ‘better’, but it can also feel slightly uninspiring at times. So, how do you stay inspired? How can you approach your role in data to deliver a positive impact – even when it’s not obvious?

To do this as developers, we must live our values through the way we work and the approach we take to build technology. And one of the best ways I’ve found do this is to apply sustainable IT practices.

Why aligning engineer practices with personal values matters

Sustainable IT covers the creation, usage, and management of IT hardware and digital products in a way that minimises their impact on the environment. This includes carbon aware computing, sustainable coding practices, conscientious hardware use policies, and prudent GenAI development and consumption. If we optimise our work for the world we live in through sustainable IT, we leave a lasting positive impact on technology, organisations, and societies.

The reason sustainable IT practices are so powerful is because they offer a meaningful way to embed sustainability into our work – even when the project itself isn’t explicitly focused on environmental or social impact. This way, our practices and behaviours as developers and engineers can reflect our values and personal mission – through every project we work on.

We get to choose how we build technology

We are now in the midst of a new Industrial Revolution (4IR), where experimentation and innovation appear rife. However, we’re also playing catch up when it comes to ethics, regulation, and sustainable practices to minimise innovation’s negative impact on the world.

In our role as developers, we are both builders and consumers of digital products and services, which means we have the power to shape the internet, businesses, and beyond, the way we want, in a unique way. So, I believe we should wield that power responsibly if we’re to avoid creating the digital equivalent of factory pollution seen throughout the Victorian era.

Sustainable engineering practices enable us to reduce the environmental impact at the code level – making it possible to contribute to sustainability, even when the project’s goals aren’t explicitly green or innovative.

One way we can do this is by applying low-carbon computing principles to our work, for example, prioritising sustainable solutions, so that our impact on the world is net positive and more resilient.

Consider this example: imagine you’re coding a programme for a basic logging system for a corporate business process. You might think this neutral, administrative task has no opportunity to have a positive impact on the world. But, as shown below in the indicative example, that’s not the case at all.

In the example, we’ve chosen 10g and 1,000× a week for easy maths – but let’s say this is a programme of the scale of sending roughly 25 text-only emails, or two basic Microsoft Copilot GenAI inferences, to give you a tangible sense of scale. Now imagine it’s a job that runs every three minutes from 8am-6pm every weekday – 1,000× per week. So, reducing your small-scale programmes’ emissions – even by marginal gains – has a real and tangible impact because of the scale of its operations.

Amplifying our purpose through critical thinking

Everything we do as developers and engineers is a vote for the way we want our products to work, the world we want to live in, and the legacy we want to have. So, with this in mind, we also need to build our holistic, critical thinking skills. Gone are the days when digital, data, and AI jobs only require STEM skills – everyone in the digital supply chain needs an awareness of their work’s role, impact, and implications to ensure what we do is consistent with our own morals and purpose.

Adding a layer of purpose and intellectual challenge to our work – a reason to do our best, and do the best – helps us to stay engaged in our work, no matter how ‘run of the mill’ or bureaucratic the programme may feel. And so, truly applying our intelligence as an extension of our purpose, means we can consciously and proactively shape the world – delivering impact with every line of code.

Engineering our future

Our capabilities as humans will never be truly understood if we don’t recognise the collateral impact of our actions. It is up to us to not be biased, to work responsibly, and to do the right thing. When meeting clients’ needs on a range of projects – not just those that might obviously connect to our purpose – the way we work is key to unlocking our motivation and legacy as a technologist.

The onus is on us: we’re engineering for our future. While it may sometimes feel like we’re just doing our job in an entirely disconnected arena – it’s a chance to reconnect with ourselves and build a lasting positive impact.

This means we have the power to fulfil our purpose, even while working on operational projects that don’t light us up. Not every project will change the world – but how we build it can. Sustainable IT is how we bring purpose to the everyday.