[jmartin2683]

It matters to the guy paying the AWS bill... or anyone who cares about their ecological impact. We have a duty to utilize resources as efficiently as possible, no different than anyone else. Building every new project on top of a mountain of abstraction that pushes resource utilization to few orders of magnitude beyond what is actually necessary to do the job is financially stupid at the least and socially irresponsible at worst.

If you're an auto manufacturer and you discover something like fuel injection that will dramatically improve efficiency for your customers (the people paying that bill), not doing so makes you a terrible engineer. The 'developer velocity' argument is pure BS... there's absolutely no direct (or even really indirect) correlation there. If the ones you have need someone else to write 9 libraries so that they can build a REST API, you need better engineers.

[xyzzy123]

For apps that are not successful, the entire output is waste, and the majority of the emissions burden is carbon output of the developers.

For work of speculative value (most startups...), optimising for dev efficiency is IMHO the right thing to do.

[jmartin2683]

The only problem is that then you end up married to your mountain of abstractions. Designing things to work as intended from the outset is, in my experience, always the better path. It’s like ‘buy once, cry once’ for technical debt/effort.