Coding for Climate Impact: Why Software Engineers are Crucial for Climate Progress
The hundreds of small, but critical ways software engineers can contribute to solving the climate challenge. Written by Jaime & Jason Curtis.
The hundreds of small, but critical ways software engineers can contribute to solving the climate challenge. Written by Jaime & Jason Curtis.
Outline
Climate change isn’t a software problem. It’s a political problem. Or an infrastructure problem. Or a hardware problem.
Sound familiar?
We couldn’t disagree more. We believe software engineering has a crucial role to play in climate tech innovation.
Software enables us to address gaps in renewable energy technology, harness the Internet of Things to make existing infrastructure more efficient, draw crucial insights from public datasets, and much more.
In our careers, we’ve implemented software solutions at climate tech companies including Convoy, Osmo Systems, and EnergySavvy to make existing hardware more efficient. Two years ago, we founded Option Zero to focus on helping climate tech firms build effective and resilient software stacks.
A representative example of our work at Option Zero: helping climate tech startup Energy Raven build an app to accelerate the residential green energy transition.
Energy Raven’s goal is to encourage homeowners to make green energy upgrades when they first purchase a new home. This is the moment when homeowners are most open to investing in expensive upgrades like solar panels or energy-efficient windows.
The app we built for Energy Raven reports information about a home’s energy performance to a new buyer, persuading them of the benefits of investing in green improvements. The app uses public databases and satellite imagery to get information about homes, modeling software to determine energy performance, and local utility grid information to calculate each home’s carbon footprint.
This is just one example of the many small, but critical ways software engineers can contribute to solving the climate challenge.
The importance of software in making progress on climate change is also evidenced by the rapidly growing number of job openings in our field. Terra.do’s job board currently lists nearly 42,600 open positions at climate tech companies, at a moment when the tech industry at large is laying off developers at an unprecedented rate. Clearly, there’s a future for software engineers in climate tech.
That’s why we created the Software Stacks in Climate Tech course with Terra.do. We leverage our experience to help you start coding for climate impact and land a job in climate tech.
The course will provide you with a deeper understanding of how software can accelerate climate progress and a portfolio project to demonstrate your skills to prospective employers. You’ll also build a network of like-minded peers who will become your colleagues in the fight against climate change.
Join the course today to take the first step towards using software to make a lasting impact on our planet’s future.
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