Boosting Engineering Productivity and Sustainability with Azul’s Erik Costlow – EcoTech Insights

Hi everyone. I'm at Code Remix in Miami and joining me now is Eric Costlow, who is the senior product manager at Azu based in California. He's here in Florida for this conference.

Eric, it's great to have you here. Thanks for having me. It's a great conference.

Yeah. So Tell me about the work that you're doing. Um, the work that we're doing is we're helping people, uh, maximize engineering productivity by figuring out what they don't have to work on.

Many applications have built up a lot of code over the years, so as they go to modernize that code, we help them figure out what they're not using, don't have to modernize and really recapture that engineering capacity. That must be a very busy time for you. Everyone is digitizing and automating their new processes.

Is this a difficult process when people aren't doing this shift and how much automation is being used? A lot of automation is being used. That's the, the role of our partnership with Modern is we help provide a unique data feed of what code you aren't using, and then they help go through and make those changes to the repository so that it becomes very visible and people can save that time.

Well, that sounds like it's also helping with productivity and efficiency. Huge amount. Yes.

Can You give an example of maybe a use case that you've seen where this has really made a difference? Yeah. When we've gone through and looked at people's applications, I've seen them shipping a lot of things that they simply don't use anymore.

Uh, a few weeks ago I helped someone identify that they were still shipping, uh, what's called a soap service, which is an integration platform from like 2002. Here it was 2025. They were still shipping that code hadn't been used in a long time.

Another group, I helped them re, uh, take a graphical interface, uh, library out of a web application wasn't used at all for other groups. We helped them minimize the amount of code that they have to actively maintain. So it works for your custom code as well.

You know, when it comes to being more green with software, that's one of the themes I've heard often is, uh, you know, not having sloppy code using code efficiency. Do you see that process kind of also keeping things more efficient in that area? Um, it just helps a huge amount.

The, the savings that we have is more about the time savings that people spend going into work every day, having to work on their applications. When you can identify what you don't have to work on, you have more time for the things that you do want to work on. You can deliver more features in terms of energy efficiency.

That is a helpful thing. The less code you have, the less things you have to do. We just help people connect on minimizing the amount of work that they have to do by focusing on what's important and what's not important.

So it's been great for me to talk to a lot of people who are in these modernization initiatives of improving their applications and then pointing out things that they simply don't have to do anymore. That's always good news. Eric Costlow, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you very much. Alright, stay this, we're gonna have some more grain interviews from Code Remix coming up.