I would say that Free & Open-Source software is a core tenant of solarpunk, and I would prioritize using and supporting it wherever possible. It's a form of prefiguration, and gives us a solid base to build upon that can't be easily ripped out from under us via enshittification.

As for what company you'll be working for, that will be a bit harder to incorporate solarpunk ideals, but not impossible if you manage to find a software co-op that is hiring. Alternatively, if you have enough friends or co-workers that would be interested, you could start your own software co-op yourself! Here's a great video from already successful software co-ops on how they're structured legally, internally, and make decisions.

!permacomputing@slrpnk.net is cool.

First, I love the energy. To your last question, if you can get into the right industries, then you can absolutely push forward solarpunk ideals. However, in many cases it entirely depends on where the funding is coming from.

I've been an ML engineer for a long time. If you work in a company or organization at an entry level, it's not really up to you how much the work will contribute to any specific ideals you have. However as you gain more experience, make connections, and yield more power overall, you can shape projects or entire portfolios towards solarpunk, assuming that fits within the constraints and meets requirements. The high level work shaping step usually takes many years and lots of experience to reach though.

I'd recommend specializing in some engineering discipline with some applications in mind, as that'll give you much more direct experience and make it more likely you'll get hired by a company/organization that does "solarpunk" research and development (R&D), and testing and evaluation (T&E). I'm assuming solarpunk tech = any kind of renewable energy or environmental improvement capabilities.

Personal: Choose FOSS first, and contribute some of your time and money towards projects that align with solarpunk ideals. Get into self-hosting and eventually perhaps community-hosting for local organizations or neighborhoods or someting like that. Find your local makerspace and meet up with tinkerers there and find common community projects to work on.

Work: At my work, my small team of devs are currently trying to break out of an otherwise heavily Microsoft-based ecosystem. So far we've gone from a general hostility towards FOSS to being allowed to run things on bare metal Linix servers instead of Azure, and I my request for a Linux laptop is approved (though still waiting on them to learn how to install Linux or something?). As part of a research project we are trying out FOSS alternatives to Microsoft products in hopes of creating interest and success stories. We are also in that project going to open source some of our internal development. I've also challenged my bosses on the heavy use of products from a single major tech company.

Are solarpunk values part of your thinking process ... which company you will be working at?

I do not  think necessarily about solarpunk, but it ends up being related to solarpunk. When you build software with the intention of it being used for a long time and for many contexts, you make it more sustainable, better against aging.

And, maybe in a broader sense, is hoping to work on projects aligned with solarpunk values realistic?

It is realistic and it should be done. Values are a guideline to follow when you need to make a decision. Values of sustainability, justice, hope will certainly guide you to build something that will help more people and have a positive impact in the world.

I work for a company that mainly does PoC projects with low TRL. This gives me the opportunity to choose the technologies that align with solarpunk: open-source libraries and standards, products that can be self-hosted and scale as needed.

Moreover, my team and department avoid using big tech products: Mattermost for comms, Nextcloud for storage and docs. Non-developers use Windows for" compatibility" reasons, otherwise, we use Linux.

Additionally, the company makes products that will be used in renewables and similar sectors, which makes it super solarpunk.