During our 10 years of DevNet celebratory webinar on March 14th, Shannon McFarland, VP of Cisco DevNet announced a coding challenge for the DevNet community. We call it the Build for Better Code Challenge and this year's topics are AI and sustainability. We give you untilMay 6thto build an application on AI or sustainability or both that will hopefully amaze the judging panel and make you a winner.

Why participate and how do you win?

Why would you want to participate? Besides the chance of being one of the three teams winning$500 in credits for the Cisco Store, you will also receive mentorship from DevNet experts, get a chance to make an impact on a global stage and be recognized as the winners of the Cisco DevNet code challenge!

As mentioned, the topics of the challenge this year are AI and sustainability. In order to decide the winners, the judging panel will look for originality of the idea, quality of code and relevance to this year's topics. While using Cisco products and technologies to build your submission for the challenge are encouraged, they are not mandatory. We want to encourage you to build your solution with as few limitations and encumbrances as possible. Anyone can participate to this coding challenge including Cisco employees and their families.

Example use cases

We also wanted to give you a few examples of use cases that would fit AI and sustainability topics for this challenge. Again, these use cases are given to you just as suggestions and for inspiration purposes, don't feel like you must work on and solve these specific ones. We've split the example use cases in three categories: energy consumption, smart buildings and energy efficiency and green coding.

Energy consumption use cases

Under energy consumption a possible use case could be to build an AI-driven carbon footprint minimizer. Utilizing the Cisco Observability Platform for example, your AI will analyze power utilization, develop carbon emissions models, and offer smart ways to decrease the carbon footprint of digital infrastructures. This tool will enable developers and businesses to quantify and mitigate their environmental impact.

Another use case for energy consumption could be building a smart energy dashboard with automation components. Picture a dashboard that not only tracks power consumption in real-time but also identifies opportunities to cut down on energy waste. Your mission would be to collect power consumption data and display it through an intuitive dashboard interface. Then, elevate your solution by coding automation scripts that interact with Cisco networking hardware, like shutting down PoE ports after hours to conserve energy.

Smart buildings and energy efficiency use cases

For smart buildings and energy efficiency a possible use case could be a Cisco-enhanced smart presence-aware lighting system. Redefine smart lighting with your coding expertise by leveraging location data from Cisco wireless networks and video cameras to intelligently control PoE lights. You can utilize the capabilities of Cisco software to ensure that lighting responds dynamically to the presence or absence of people in a space, thereby conserving energy.

A second use case for smart buildings and energy efficiency could be an AI-driven climate control advisor. You could use a solution like the Cisco Observability Platform to integrate data from temperature sensors, HVAC systems, and weather applications to feed into an AI that not only suggests improvements in power utilization but also provides future energy consumption predictions. Your application can lead to optimized climate control strategies and a marked reduction in energy waste.

Green coding use cases

For green coding use cases, think of an eco-friendly programming language selector AI. Create an AI bot that helps determine the most energy-efficient programming language for a given task. Envision a tool that recommends the optimal programming language for a specific task with minimizing power usage in mind.

Another possible use case for green coding could be the code efficiency enhancer AI. This AI bot epitomizes smart and eco-friendly coding by accurately estimating and analyzing code power consumption and CPU cycles. Your solution will not just analyze code but it will also suggest enhancements to streamline code for superior efficiency and sustainability.

What do you want to build?

As mentioned before, all these use cases are just for inspiration purposes, and you are more than free to come up with your own use cases or improve on the ones above. Also keep in mind, you can use the free DevNet sandboxes as a testing ground for your solution in the challenge.

You can find additional details about this coding challenge here. If you have questions please reach out to the DevNet community. Or you an leave me a comment in the space below. We wish you good luck on this code challenge and are super excited to see the ideas and solutions that you all are coming up with!