Sustainable Software: Measuring our Carbon Footprint

I spent most of my career thinking about software performance in terms of latency, throughput, and cost. CPU cycles per request. P99 response times. Monthly AWS bills. Those are the metrics that show up in dashboards; those are the numbers managers care about.

Carbon emissions never made the list.

That’s starting to change, and I think it’s worth paying attention — not because sustainability is trendy (though it is) but because the numbers are genuinely staggering once you look at them.