Developing for Good
The last meandering text exchange I had with my father took a surreal turn when he interjected “there’s a tornado warning now. I can see it.” The thread went eerily silent, but after a tense hour, he sent me this photo:
Having grown up in the most tornado-prone county in the United States, I videotaped my first tornado on a bulky VHS camcorder for a Denver TV station when I was 12. In graduate school in Kansas, I photographed a twister for the Lawrence Journal World as it neared town, and I witnessed a handful of others left unphotographed from the days before ubiquitous cell phones. All that to say that I am familiar with tornadoes and the risks they involve.
However, two days after the conversation with my Dad, I was still not prepared for my leisurely dog walk to be interrupted by the robotic wailing of my cellphone as it received an emergency broadcast. While living in a big city, these robo-alerts were fairly common, but in the Atlantic backwoods of mid-coast Maine, this was about as jarring and unexpected as being accosted by a troupe of howler monkeys. My shock did not abate when I saw that it wasn’t an Amber alert, but rather a Tornado warning. In Maine!
I scrambled to a scenic overlook where I could see the quick-moving storm, rotation, and a wall cloud.
A French sailor joined me at the overlook. “Mon dieu,” she clucked at the clouds. “This looks like Florida.”
The threat of death, albeit distant, from a long black cloud was just another reminder of the changing climate and the enormity of the problems facing our planet. Taking shelter from a storm or laying on a therapist’s couch, my gears are constantly churning like a mesocyclone wondering what I, a software developer, can do to help.
To be clear, Maine averages 2 tornadoes per year, and experiencing a tornado warning there is not proof of climate change. But we must be honest with ourselves: from overfishing and deforestation to poisoning the air we breathe, we humans are taking a massive toll on the planet and it would be foolish, perhaps catastrophic, to ignore this monumental fact. Our modern way of life is patently not sustainable: we take far more than we give. Are we really content to drive the planet towards uninhabitability as we keep moving the goalposts on what constitutes “normal”?
I was pleased when I stumbled across a like-minded concern from individuals in the Elixir forums who wondered about establishing an “Elixir for Good” community. Ruby has a “Ruby for Good” organization that aims to help build technology solutions to benefit nonprofits.
However, the forum thread mirrored my own chimeric misgivings on the topic: the responses ranged from enthusiastic support to measured pessimism doubting the efficacy of such an endeavor. I honestly don’t know what type of effort can move the needle on a problem as vast as climate change, I only wish I could say that I was doing all I could to help solve problems that transcend individuals.
I realize while writing this that I may be able to answer my own question. The philosophy of Effective Altruism posits that there are charitable organizations and causes that do more good than others, and there are ways to measure this. Surely coding efforts, just like donations, can be optimized for greater effect. I recently discovered Do Good Better, a book by William MacAskill, and I want to commit to reading the book and orienting myself with its concepts. The next time you look up to the sky, you’ll be reminded of the work we can still do and the possibility that our planet can improve, even if it means writing a few lines of code.
