Green Software: Making Progress, But Let's Be Honest About Where We Are
My conversation with Wilco Burggraaf at VoxxDays Amsterdam
Wilco built a 700-member Green Software Foundation community in the Netherlands in eight months. Impressive? Absolutely. A sign that green software is going mainstream? Not quite.
The Reality Check
Here’s what struck me about our conversation: even with that kind of community growth, Wilco still has to take sustainability conversations to regular tech events rather than expect developers to come to green software meetups:
“We also try to not only preach to our own choir… but we also go to places where maybe people not really that the focus point was sustainability it’s a sidetrack topic.”
Translation: most developers still see sustainability as optional. In fact, many still think the impact they can have for sustainability is in their personal lives (like driving an EV and recycling) and whilst I am not knocking personal actions, actually there are huge opportunities to have a positive impact day to day as a technologist (as per the Tech Carbon Standard).
Why It’s Still Hard
The technical complexity (and also greenwashing and lack of transparency from tech companies) doesn’t help those who are looking to take action. As Wilco explained:
“The hard topic is… the relationship between energy efficiency or energy consuming versus compute efficiency that there’s not always a direct relationship.”
When you can’t give developers a simple “do this, save the planet” message, adoption stays slow. Add to that Wilco’s observation that idle time might matter more than the hotspots everyone focuses on, and you’ve got an education challenge that goes well beyond technical documentation.
The AI Wild Card
AI might force the issue through corporate reporting requirements:
“If you hear a general CTO saying like we only can survive as a company if we use AI… and AI to its core it’s just software… that means software materialises so it should be reported more on in the reports.”
External pressure might achieve what internal motivation hasn’t.
What’s Actually Working
Wilco’s building tools that combine existing open source projects into CI/CD pipelines. Practical stuff that teams can actually use. As I noted during our chat:
“Not all code is important to optimise… thinking about your open source upstream dependencies… could you contribute back to the open source project make that more efficient.”
The Bottom Line
We’re making genuine progress on green software engineering. The tools are getting better, the communities are growing, and people like Wilco are doing excellent work. But let’s not kid ourselves—we’re still in the early education phase, not approaching mainstream adoption.
Worth understanding why, though. Listen to the full conversation for Wilco’s insights on measurement tools, community building, and where the real opportunities might lie:
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