Green IO

Green IO with Gaël Duez explores how to reduce the environmental impact of our digital world. Twice a month, on a Tuesdays guests from across the globe share insights, tools, and alternative approaches, enabling all responsible technologists, within the Tech sector and beyond, to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time.

Latest episodes

Jan 25, 2023 • 1h 10min

#7.b - Cameron Casher and Benjamin Davy - Cloud Sustainability beyond carbon emission

Sep 6, 2022 • 41min

#7.a - Cameron Casher and Benjamin Davy - Measuring the Carbon Footprint of Cloud computing from CCF to AWS, Azure and GCP sustainability dashboards

Aug 25, 2022 • 41min

#6 - David Mytton - Bringing reliable and transparent information to Green IT

In this episode, we go to London and meet David Mytton the co-founder and CEO of Console and also an academic doing his PhD on sustainable computing in Oxford University 🎓. All David’s work follow a consistent thread that could be described as “Effective Sustainability requires reliable and transparent information”. Under this angle, we discussed the environmental impact of datacenters and why the estimates vary so much, the accuracy of carbon footprint calculators for websites as well as the choice of language and CI/CD when we aim to develop greener code 👩‍💻. ❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!Learn more about our guest and connect: David's blogDavid's LinkedInGaël's LinkedIn Gaël's website Green I/O website 📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics. David's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:Aslan J. et al. "Electricity Intensity of Internet Data Transmission: Untangling the Estimates" August 2017Shehabi, A. and E. Masanet US Data Center Energy Usage Report January 2016Google LighthouseGerry McGovern's newsletter David's article "Data centre water consumption" February 2021David and Masaõ Ashtine's article "Sources of data center energy estimates: A comprehensive review" July 2022Pereira et al. "Ranking programming languages by energy efficiency" May 2021 and the older version "Energy efficiency across programming languages: how do energy, time, and memory relate?" October 2017David MacKay's book “Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air” January 2009John Andrews and Nick Jelley's book "Energy Science" November 2021TranscriptGaël: Hello, everyone. For this episode, we go back to London to have an amazing talk with David Mitton, the co-founder and CEO of Console, an Angel investor and an academic doing his PhD on sustainable computing in Oxford University. Now, let's be honest. Interviewing David is both a privilege and a challenge, a privilege, because he ranks super high on my list of world class experts in digital sustainability among people like Gauthier Roussilhe, for instance, but also a challenge because he covers so many angles in green IT that I would like to record a 4 hours long episode. Still, there is a consistent threat among all David's work that could be labeled as “Effective sustainability requires reliable and transparent information”. Under this angle, we discussed the environmental impact of data centers and why the estimates vary so much, the accuracy of carbon footprint calculators for websites, as well as the choice of language and CI/CD when we aim to develop greener code. But let's talk a bit about David first from 2009 to 2018, David was co-founder and CEO at Server Density, a London based SaaS infrastructure monitoring startup which got subsequent VC funding and achieved to attract more than 700 customers. When StackPath acquired the company, he joined it for two years as their lead product engineer. Then he completed an environmental technology MsC at Imperial College, London, where he developed his interest in sustainable computing. He continued that research on the sustainable team at Uptime Institute. Eventually, he launched Console in early 2021 to provide the best tools for developers while starting a part-time PhD in Oxford University. Welcome, David. Thanks a lot for joining Green Area today,David: Hello. It's very kind introduction, Thank you very much.Gaël: First of all, what did I miss in your bio? David: It's a good question because my hobbies overlap very much with what I do on a daily basis, which is the console.dev newsletter to help engineers find tools. And I just really enjoy playing around with computers. And so I do that all day playing with dev tools and Cloud infrastructure and then at the weekends - and sometimes during the week as well - I'm also investigating the sustainability of everything I've been playing with during the week because I think it's important for us to be able to continue using all these digital services whilst reducing the environmental impact. And so my hobby is the academic side of things, which is why I'm starting a PhD at Oxford to continue the work that I first got interested in at Imperial in sustainable computing.Gaël: So you could describe yourself as a sustainability geek.David: Yes, I think so. Technology broadly and then sustainable technology, specificallyGaël: How this interest in sustainability, and especially the sustainability in ICT came first. Did you have some kind of ha ha moment?David: It came once I sold my company in 2018, and I joined the acquirer as you mentioned StackPath and ran their product engineering team for a bit. But then I was thinking about what challenges we're going to face as a civilization over the coming decades and how I could apply my time, my skills to contribute to solving some of those issues. And I decided that climate change was a major challenge that really needed to be fixed. This was pre-covid, of course, so that was the biggest challenge that I saw at the time, and I decided I needed to bootstrap my knowledge in environmental technology and environmental sustainability in general because I have absolutely no or had no background in it prior to that. And so I did a masters degree at Imperial College here in London, in environmental sustainability and technology, and that really covers, covered, everything from fisheries management through to clean energy and vectors for disease control with mosquitoes. But I specialize specifically in energy technology and that I chose that because I thought that was the most tangible and applicable area that was currently in motion at the move to renewable and clean energy essentially. So specializing in energy, I then was able to link my experiencing cloud and software to start getting into the sustainability aspects of the usage of I t globally.Gaël: So we mentioned reliable metrics being a pillar of your work, both as an academic and as an entrepreneur. And I'd like to have your opinion on the carbon calculators for websites which are blossoming across the world. Sorry if this question might be a bit controversial but are they reliable? All of them? Only some of them? And what could be the use?David: Generally they're not very reliable, and they're not much use. In my opinion, the problem comes down to the methodology and I would distinguish general website calculators from the Cloud Carbon footprint calculators that are provided by the cloud providers, which all three of them Amazon, Google, Microsoft, they now will have their own calculator. I put those in a separate category, the ones that I think you're referencing just general Calculators are available from a number of different places onlineGaël: and dedicated for websites, not not the full infrastructure. Most of the time.David: That's right. Yeah, So the way that they are working is they generally scan your website and look at all the assets, CSS, images, JavaScript, all that kind of stuff and calculate the total page size. And then they apply an energy factor, which is typically taken from academic literature and then multiply the energy factor by the page size, and that gives you the total amount of energy that is consumed on a single page load. And then that can give you a number that you can use to calculate based on the number of visitors to your website, and that gives you the total energy consumption and then governments around the world they all published carbon factors, which allows you to convert that energy consumption into carbon emissions. And that's the number that usually gets out of these calculators. But it makes a fundamental assumption around the energy factor, and typically you see these being taken from academic literature that provides a single number. It's often kilowatt hours per gigabyte, and then they multiply that by the data transfer. And that has some major limitations, which means it's essentially inaccurate and not much use. And this is compared to the carbon footprint calculators you get from the cloud providers, which will go into your full infrastructure and all of the details. And they look at their actual energy consumption from all of the data centers and the full footprint of the infrastructure, whoever it is that you're using. And then they are portioning it across all their customers, so far more challenging with those because different companies are more transparent than others. But because they're using actual energy consumption rather than the calculators which are just using factors multiplying them, they're significantly more accurate.Gaël: We had an episode dedicated to Cloud Carbon Footprint and the different methodologies and pro and cons regarding the big three - I would say - carbon calculators with Cameron Kasher and Benjamin Davy. It was a fascinating discussion. But going back to the website calculator, is there any other bias?David: The first challenge, I would say, is that it drastically simplifies how website infrastructure works and how websites are actually delivered to users. So if you're just looking at the page size and using that as the total amount of data transferred, then that misses out a huge part of what's going on behind the scenes. So, for example, is that data downloaded every single time you load the page? It is the first time, but on the second and the third times it's not. It's cached by the browser. And then you've got caching happening on the infrastructure behind the scenes because there are content delivery networks. There's also processing that can happen in the browser. So if you're executing JavaScript or playing a video, then there's processing happening in the browser. But there's also processing happening on the service side if you're doing any kind of service side rendering or querying databases, so you're missing out some major components in just how the page is rendered. And then the energy factor, this number that you get kilowatt hours per gigabyte.This is an average, so it doesn't really capture any of the key differences between different types of applications. It's just looking at the average amount of energy per unit of data and misses out things like Web browsing versus video streaming, for example, which is much more intensive on the data volumes. Often you'll see a number that has been cited from a paper by Aslan from a couple of years ago as linear. Commonly, you'll see it as 0.65 kilowatt hours per gigabyte. That's assuming the number has been correctly adjusted because the number that they publish in the paper is actually for 2015. And you have to make adjustments for projected improvements in efficiency where they project. It's going to fall by half every two years, so you have to project that out to get the current year. The further out you make projections and make these changes, the less accurate they are, because it's very difficult to predict changes in infrastructure and improvements in efficiency and also that number from the Aslan’s paper. It only refers to fixed line networks. And that excludes a major source of traffic, which is mobile,Gaël: Which is crazy because - and I speak about something that I have experienced when I was working in the prop tech industry - very often platforms reach 70 or 80% of traffic being done via mobile.David: That's right, yeah, so the application is really important. And then finally, I think it only refers to infrastructure in countries with modern equipment, and that's relevant for countries in Western Europe. But as you have more infrastructure being deployed in countries that are not as advanced, then you're missing out potentially significant components of the environmental impact of that. So all of these things combine to mean that the number is basically useless, that you get from the carbon calculators. And actually it's more useful to look at something like the Google Lighthouse to use performance as a proxy for energy consumption. Because if the page is loading faster and you reduce asset sizes and you tweak your cashing and all those kind of things, then you're making more efficient use of the infrastructure justGaël: To close the topic of website carbon calculators. I understand you don't believe in the accuracy of the numbers provided but are they consistent? Meaning that the number is wrong but the evolution could still be interesting to follow and to track just to know if you're going into the right direction.David: I don't think so, because many of the things that you change as a result of, say, the Google Lighthouse project would not be reflected in the carbon calculators, the website carbon calculators. So, for example, if you improve the caching and the calculator doesn't look at the caching - it's just looking at the full page load - you've made an improvement that is invisible to those calculators, and it would still show the exact same carbon number. The challenge is that it's somewhat unintuitive that increased amount of data would have minimal or no effect on the amount of energy consumed. Because you assume that if you're using more data then it needs more energy and generally that's not the case. This is an emerging area, I suppose, in academic research, and there's a limited amount of our papers to point to. But over the last two years, thereabouts, there have been some papers that look into this in more detail and the approach I describe around using the factor multiplied by the data transferred is known as kind of an allocation method where you're allocating the data to the energy or vice versa, and that has its uses. It's useful for reporting because if you know the amount of data that you transferred, the amount of energy that you've consumed by looking at your electricity meter too, then you can divide them and allocate them and then you get an intensity figure and you can look over time at your those two numbers and hopefully see a reducing energy. Improving energy efficiency to reduce intensity factor. So over time, if you're transmitting more data but you're using less energy, then your intensity would decrease over time, and that is useful to track. But it assumes you've got access to the data volume, which generally isn't that difficult to get access to. But it's more challenging to get access to that energy number because it's not exposed by the cloud providers. And unless you are racking your own equipment in a data center, you're not going to be able to get access to it. And the challenges that this unintuitive nature of how networks work, it comes down to understanding how those networks are deployed and, as it turns out, the way that networks work as you deploy the network equipment. And it has a baseline amount of energy consumption, which is a factor of the capacity of that piece of equipment. But it is almost completely disconnected from the actual usage. It's not correlated. Certainly not linearly correlated. So networks are provisioned for peak load and they’re provisioned for redundancy. And when you add that new equipment, that's when the energy increase occurs.Certainly the energy increase that is significant in terms of measuring. It's not when you push more data through the equipment, at least not on a linear basis, and that is the common error that is made with these carbon calculators. The website Carbon Calculators is that they assume that energy consumption is linear and it's proportional to the amount of data that is transmitted, which isn't the case.Gaël: Thanks a lot for your honesty and straightforwardness about these tools. We could already start grasping it, and I mentioned it in my introduction, you’re a true infrastructure expert as well. You wrote several articles, academic articles on the environmental footprint of data centers both Cloud and Private Data Center. I'd like to start by not talking about energy for the moment and focus on water. Thought leaders in digital sustainability like Gerry McGovern, for instance, in his New Thinking newsletter are more and more vocal about it. Several hyperscalers experienced severe pushbacks in the Netherlands or in Denmark, for instance, regarding the water consumption. And I rediscovered recently that actually you wrote something about it back in February 2021. So what could you tell us about the water consumption of the infrastructure and maybe more specifically, the data centers?David: Water consumption of data centers is an interesting topic because it is a lot more challenging to explain than energy consumption and carbon emissions. So when you're thinking about carbon emissions our goal is zero - net zero essentially - for carbon emissions, and that's a very simple marketing message. It's a very simple goal, and everyone can understand what we're trying to do. So when we're transitioning to clean energy, we mean zero carbon energy, and the goal is obvious. Water consumption is not so clear cut because the goal is not always zero water and you have to understand the context of the location of the data center to decide what the goal should be. So if you have a data center that is deployed in a region that has abundant water, perhaps it's next to a lake or a source of water that is not stressed in any way and is well maintained, then the water consumption - you should pay certainly for access to water, and you should consider the efficiency and making sure that your usage is reasonable - but it doesn't need to be zero, and you can invest your resources, your capital resources elsewhere. That is completely different from building a data center in a region that is very hot and has challenges with the governance of the water supply, or has other users of the water supply that are potentially of higher importance and where there might be drought and common problems with stress to the water system and in those regions, then zero water might be a goal that you use, but it depends on what you're trading off, because sometimes reducing water consumption can mean an increase in energy consumption and so you have to understand which one you're trying to optimize for. There are also some challenges of what you mean by water consumption, because in a data center there are two different types. There's direct water consumption, which is typically what people think of when they're thinking of what data centers do with water. And that is the use of water for cooling, typically in air conditioning and chiller units within the data center to keep the environment at a set temperature so that the IT equipment that can operate efficiently. But that's actually the smaller part of water consumption. Indirect water consumption is quite significantly larger, and that is the water consumption associated with the power generation that goes to produce the electricity for a data center. Because around the world we are still using majority fossil fuels and fossil fuels are part of thermo electric power generation. Water is a key component in how our electricity is generated because the fuel is burnt to turn water into steam and the steam turns the turbine and that is what generates the electricity. Or if you're using hydropower in some regions, then there can be even higher water consumption there because the water is being used to generate the power as part of the hydroelectric dam. For example, whether that is a true consumption depends on the downstream users. You might use that water somewhere else. Um and so you kind of got a dual use for it. But sometimes the water is discarded, or, um is not used again, and that can be actual consumption. And so you have to combine these two factors to think about what the data centers actually drawing, and where is it drawing it from, and also where you're generating your electricity for the data center, which could be quite a long way away from where that data center is and what is the water footprint in that region? And understanding the relative stress of both of those locations is important to understanding the true water footprint of a data center.Gaël: And you say that a significant part of the water footprint is actually caused by electricity consumption. Could you give a rough estimation?David: Off the top of my head? I think it's 2 to 3 times more water consumption from the power generation, but I would have to refer you to the paper that you mentioned that I wrote. There's a graph in there. There's also a graph in the 2016 Data Center Energy Report by Shehabi and Massenet, which includes a good breakdown of the water consumption data centers as well. So for the actual numbers, have a look at those two papers.Gaël: I will. And actually, my listeners know that every article, document that is mentioned in an episode is put in the episode show notes. So now that we talked a bit about the water footprint - and thanks a lot for sharing this bit of counterintuitive information once again; the second one in the show - let's go back to energy. And, you wrote very recently an article about - I'm sorry to put it in plain English - but the mess about estimates around the data center energy usage. Could you tell us a bit more why? Which one should we rely on? And are we on the verge of a catastrophic increase in electricity consumption in data centers that will imperish the energy transition or not? [laughing] Scary musicDavid: [laughing] So you're referring to a paper that I co authored with my colleague at Oxford Masaõ and we looked at all of the data Centre energy estimates from 2007 to 2021 this was just published in July as a review article, and we looked at 46 papers or at least 46 were suitable for inclusion. We actually looked at hundreds and hundreds of papers, but we had some quite strict inclusion criteria because we wanted to ensure that they were original calculations. The calculations were transparent enough that we could have a look at the sources and the methodology, and that they applied to a specific region that was large enough to be an estimate for a particular geography. So, for example, it could be a country, or it could be a region of a of a larger geographical area such as the EU, and we extracted 258 individual estimates and looked into almost 700 different sources because the key to creating accurate estimates is the variables that are used in the methodology and the values that you put in for those variables, and our results showed that over 30%, or thereabouts 30%, were from peer reviewed publications, but the majority were not so 38% were from non peer reviewed reports. A large number of those lacked clear methodology, and it was difficult to find where the data had come from. And both IDC and Cisco made up almost 60% of all of the sources. So just two companies provided the majority of the sources. And the particular challenges that many of the sources about 11% had broken Web links and 10% we just couldn't find. And whilst the goal of the review is not to highlight any individual publication, but we did give some examples of some good publications about their methodology, we made some recommendations to people who actually are using these numbers and producing them. So three groups, in particular the general end users, so journalists, people working at nonprofits or advocacy groups who don't necessarily have a scientific background looking at the academic articles and be able to trust the numbers that are published are actually correct so they can do their wider work. Then there's the research community who's actually producing these, which is typically academics. But also the third group, which is particularly important, is growing in importance is policymakers and regulators within the grid operators, for example, people within the energy sector who are planning the infrastructure that delivers electricity to data centers and to homes and offices and cities because it takes a very long time to build out the energy infrastructure. And so the challenge that we spotted originally was just the wide variance in the numbers you mentioned. You can find energy consumption estimates ranging from 200 terawatt hours a year to almost 8000 terawatt hours a year, depending on the year that the estimate is for. And that range is completely absurd. Because it's so wide, multiple orders of magnitude. It just makes it completely useless. And rebuilding our energy infrastructure to deal with two or 300 terawatt hours of total global energy consumption is completely different from building something out to deal with 8000 terawatt hours. And so the motivation behind the article was to figure out where all these numbers are coming from and try and understand why there might be such variance in the literature.Gaël: These numbers, these extreme numbers, do they come from, I would say non academic, non peer reviewed articles and studies, or actually well documented and written papers following a methodology which is replicable with open data, etcetera. They actually agree to disagree also, and they also find a very wide range of energy consumption.David: It depends on the methodology of the paper. So there are several different approaches to creating data center energy estimates. You've got bottom up modeling so that looks at the equipment that is deployed and the energy characteristics of that equipment from the manufacturers and from databases like spec Power, which do testing of equipment. And then that is combined with market data. To try and calculate how many of these pieces of equipment, how many servers, how many these drives all those kind of things have actually been sold and deployed. And how is that going to change over time? And so by creating these models of how much has been sold? This is what is the power consumption of that equipment you can start creating some numbers around. What would the energy consumption of that equipment be? The next method is a top down methodology, and this is an example where you would get numbers from an organization or a government that has actually looked at the amount that's consuming. So a classic example is a telecoms operator or an owner of a large scale data center they would look at all of their energy consumption, and then they'll publish it. And by taking that single number of the total energy consumption, you can apportion it across users or data transferred or something like that to provide a kind of a historical estimate of what was actually used and then apply that per user or per subscriber. And then there's a third type of methodology which uses either of those two top down or bottom up methodologies as a baseline and then applies an extrapolation figure out into the future based on some or several scenarios of what they expected growth will be. And this is useful to make projections out a couple of years into the future. And when you look at the bottom up methodologies and top down methodologies. They do this, they will take their historical figure, and then they will apply a growth factor and consider what it might look like a couple of years into the future. The difference with the extrapolation based models is that they project very far out into the future. And as I said earlier, the further out into the future you project, the less accurate your projections are going to be, because it's very difficult to account for all of the potential changes in infrastructure and energy efficiency and government policies and all those kinds of things. And what we see is that the very large range of estimates typically comes from the papers and the reports that use this extrapolation based methodology. They say If these trends continue or something happens, then energy will increase significantly over time. But the common characteristic of all these is that you never see that massive growth in the past. You see it gradually growing, sometimes plateauing, but there is never a sudden massive increase. But then, in these projections, you'll see at a certain point the growth factor will be applied and the graph in the paper goes exponential and you see crazy growth. And that's when you get the numbers as high as 10,000 terawatt hours. And these are just not realistic because they haven't seen that happen in the past. But B, that is not how technology tends to evolve because there are efficiencies and that you get from new technologies and things change. That means that these values just don't make sense.Gaël: Fair point. So albeit the energy consumption of data centers is something that is very important, that should be well taken into consideration in the energy mix to meet Paris agreement regarding greenhouse gas emissions that should not be covered with an apocalyptic tune.David: I think what generally happens is the person who is writing or creating a project has already decided what they want, the number to show, and they then go and find the academic research that supports those numbers. And you can see this in several examples that we use in the paper, which reports that publish value judgments based on whether data is useful or not, or whether we should cut back on wasteful behavior. And whilst there is something to be said for changing user behavior, my view is that's a waste of time and should be down to the user to decide what is useful to them, and nobody else should be making judgments about how they're using technology and actually our goal should be to make technology sustainable broadly so that regardless of what the user does, then they can benefit from sustainable infrastructure because I don't think we're going to change user behavior sufficiently enough to have an impact. And we should make that change on behalf of the user by changing the infrastructure, so essentially they have no choice about it. But when you make value judgments about whether technology is good or bad, or certain technologies are good or bad, then I think that gets into too much of a kind of like a nanny state type approach where you're controlling what people are doing based on your own perspective rather than based on what the users want to do. And like with anything, you can find statistics to back up any point you'd like to make. And that has been a particular challenge. I think, in the realm of data center energy consumption, because you can use these papers that have since been quite significantly debunk. There have been challenges made to the methodologies, but you continue to see people citing the older papers just because they back up the point that they had already decided they wanted to makeGaël: Thanks a lot for all these insights regarding the environmental footprint for data centres. I wanted to ask you a very simple question, which might take a bit of time to answer. Let's say I'm a CTO. I'm a lead engineer. I'm just simply a concerned Software developer. How should I get started to write greener code, not taking into consideration the infrastructure? Because sometimes you're in an organization where the infrastructure is as it is, not necessarily in a devops environment. And I've got this crazy question also, at some point, do you believe that at some point we will see in good CI/CD pipelines, sustainable variables being taken into account?David: There's a good paper on this by Pereira et al., which was published in 2021 as a follow up to a paper they published a couple of years before that, which looks at the energy efficiency of all the major programming languages. And it gives some advice on how engineers how developers should think about this because it does come down to language choice. But it also comes down to what you're trying to optimize for, and often we think that well, because energy is basically power multiplied by time, then you can reduce the time of the execution to reduce the energy consumption, and that does have a factor to play. But there are challenges with how code is deployed. That means that might not necessarily be true. So, for example, you can reduce the amount of time that it takes to complete a calculation by deploying that calculation across 10,000 servers. Assuming that the operation is parallelised, for that doesn't reduce the energy consumption, but it does reduce the time. Then you have to think about “Okay, so what are you trying to optimise”? Are you trying to optimise for just the raw energy consumption? Are you trying to optimise for the time it takes to complete the processing or you're trying to optimise for memory? And that third one is the one that's often forgotten because there is an energy impact for memory consumption, and you can kind of see that by how the cloud providers bill for things like serverless functions like AWS lambda. There's a compute component, and there's a memory component, and you pay for more memory to be allocated to your serverless function. And whilst it's not always the case, that price is a direct proxy for energy consumption. It stands to reason that the price of energy is a component in how AWS decide to price their services. And so understanding how these different components of your code play together will inform what you're trying to do. When it comes to which language is the best, again you have to ask the question or for what. But as the two papers I mentioned show, C is generally the best language for all of them, although not quite the case for memory. But in the top two or three languages you've always got C and Rust and Go is pretty good as well when it comes to execution time in memory. But if you're writing everything in C, then you're trading off other things like memory safety and understand the maintainability of the code. Because writing in C is very low level, it is very high performance, but is the result the result of writing in memory unsafe languages is the cause of a large number of security issues we've seen over the last few decades. Those are somewhat mitigated by switching to Rust, but Rust is a very difficult language to learn. That's certainly what I found when I was learning it. And I think most people say that there is a quite steep learning curve. Once you get it, then it's a good language. But there is that learning curve there, and these are the challenges that CTO has to think through is what are they trading off? Maybe it's developer productivity, and it takes a bit longer to get code into production because you've got onboard new engineers into Rust. At a large company, that might not matter; at a small startup where weeks or months of additional development time could mean the difference between success and running out of money then maybe that is more of a consideration. And writing Web services in C, I don't see that very often. It's more typescript and JavaScript. As a product develops, then maybe you split things out and you might have a particular component that's rewritten in a more performant language. Writing algorithms in C that certainly makes a lot of sense compared to writing in Javascript, but it really depends on what you're trying to do. So thinking about these things, I think, is important and having those numbers appear in the CI builds would be interesting. You might want to see code coverage. You might want to see the cost of your infrastructure. You might also want to see the carbon impact or the energy impact of your infrastructure. And then you can then see which of those you want to optimize for which you want to change. I think it's more likely that it's going to be trying to avoid sudden spikes, certainly with cost. You want to see that your code didn't inadvertently deploy something that's going to cost you 10 or 20 times more than you expected. And I think potentially we'll see the same thing with the carbon impact. And you don't want to see a sudden spike of carbon impact that you weren't expecting. And removing those unintended consequences, I think, is probably going to be the first step. But as soon as you get into the optimization of very small numbers or you're starting to spend a lot of time optimizing for things like energy consumption, you'll probably also optimize for memory and also trying to understand how to make that particular operation more performance, and that comes with scale. And so these are all the things that are considered as part of a project rather than just focusing on a single number.Gaël: That's very actionable tips that you shared right now! Being mindful of time, my last question would be “What would be your recommendations to learn more about digital sustainability and sustainable computing - your area of expertise?” It can be books, video experts to follows, articles, et cetera.David: I think the best way to learn more about this is to get into the fundamental science of how sustainable energy and energy science works in general. So I would highly recommend the master's degree that I did at Imperial College. But in the absence of being able to spend a full year full time and the cost of that, then there are two books which were on the reading list for the course. The first one is a book simply called “Energy Science”. It's an Oxford University press publication by Andrews and Jelly. I think it is that is a fundamental it's fundamental science about how energy systems work and a brand new edition was just published this year, I think which is good more broadly in terms of sustainable energy. There's a book by McKay called Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, and that is a very pragmatic and realistic look at what it would take to solve the energy challenges that we have and the transition to clean energy. Because often there's a lot of talk around big projects like “Well, let's just plan hundreds of millions of trees” or “let's just shift to solar energy” without actually understanding the big challenges were “just” doing that thing. And the emphasis is often on the word “just” rather than trying to think through what it practically means. And that book actually does all the math behind it. It's slightly out of date, but it is still generally valid, and that gives you a very good understanding of how sustainable energy should work and can work.Gaël: Thanks a lot. So go back to basics that will be your main message with these two books.David: I think so, Yeah, understanding the science because that's the foundation of everythingGaël: Which is very consistent with everything you shared with us in this episode. So thanks a lot for attending. I feel that there are a few dozen questions that I would have loved to ask you and to go a bit more in depth. But maybe another time! So for that episode, thanks a lot for being with us today.David: Excellent. Thanks for having me on.❤️ Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like. 📧 Our Green IO monthly newsletter is also a good way to be notified, as well as getting carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents.

Jul 18, 2022 • 48min

#4.b - Chris Adams - An overview of initiatives and latest trends in Digital Sustainability

Jun 29, 2022 • 46min

#5 - Hannah Smith - Greening WordPress: it's not all black and white

For this episode we went to South England, near Exmoor national park, to meet Hannah Smith aka hanopcan. She is one of the most vocal sustainability advocates in the WordPress community as as in many others from Climate Action Tech to the Green Web Foundation. She will blow your mind with her pragmatic and efficient approach and will help you make almost 40% of all the words websites greener.❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode! Learn more about our guest and connect: Hannah's twitterHannah's LinkedInHannah’s websiteGaël's LinkedIn Gaël's website Green I/O website 📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics. Hannah's links and other references mentioned in this episode The Green Web Foundation website Climate Action Tech websiteHannah being interviewed in "This is HCD" podcastWholeGrain scoring system explained by Tom Greenwood in episode #61 of the Techologie podcastGerry McGovern's book World Wide WasteJack Lennox’s talk at WordCamp Berlin (2019)Tom Greenwood's talk at WordCamp Bristol (2019)Branch magazine websiteDoughnuts economics websiteUncle Bob’s talk about the future of programming WordPress tools:SmushShort pixelStratticCabin analyticsTranscriptGaël: Hello everyone. Welcome to Green IO - the podcast for doers making our digital world greener one bite at a time. I'm your host Gaël Duez and I invite you to meet with me a wide range of guests working in the digital tech industry to better understand and make sense of its sustainability issues and find inspiration together for the next move to green the IT we use or the digital products we build. If you like the podcast, please rate it five stars on Apple, Spotify or your favorite platform to spread the word to more responsible technologists like you. And now enjoy the show! Hello, everyone. In this episode, we go through the Southwest of England in the beautiful Exmoor National park. We had the pleasure to meet Hannah. Well, this time it was a remote recording, so I didn't have the pleasure to experience the park. But Hannah told me it's a beautiful place and I trust her. Hannah Smith, better known as hanopcan, is one of the most vocal sustainability advocates in the WordPress community. Okay, okay, okay! I hear you. What? Wordpress? A CMS supporting the move toward a more sustainable web? Are you kidding? Just wait to listen to Hannah. She will blow your mind and help you make almost 40% of all the world's websites greener. And she knows what she talks about because she's a diehard developer, having started coding when she was still a teenager sneaking on her dad's PC at home, but also because of all the energy she puts in sustainable initiatives, from having launched the Green Tech Southwest Meet-up in Bristol to being a volunteer in the Climate Action Tech community as well as the Green Web Foundation. And I believe she will tell us more about her recent fellowship in this foundation soon. And there is also another topic Hannah is passionate about... and I have to stop here and let her tell us about it. Welcome, Hannah. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.Hannah: Thank you Gaël. It’s lovely to be here with you and super fun to be talking about tech sustainability and Wordpress sustainability as well.Gaël: Great. So if I want to launch a podcast on snowboarding, you should be my first guest. Is this correct?Hannah: Hell, yes. Yeah, yeah. If I won the lottery and didn't have to like think too much about money and maybe like sustainability. I just want to snowboard. That would be my like, yes, my top thing to do. The mountains are such fun places.Gaël: Yeah, you speak from my heart when it comes to snow sliding sports. And you know, I'm using this weird wording to dodge the old debate between skiing, snowboarding, and…Hannah: I've actually been learning to do both. So snowboarding is where my passion lies, where my heart is but I have been learning to ski as well. And I'm also really good at tobogganing as well. I discovered I can do like proper Mario Car Superpower slides down toboggan tracks as well, which is super fun.Gaël: Do you throw the turtle?Hannah: Do I throw the turtle? Yeah, but my dog is normally roaming alongside me actually when I go tobogganing. It's a good way to exercise her. So I don't know. It might be a bit mean trying to throw turtles at her. I'm trying to maybe throw more like the mushroom power ups or something. Gaël: that works as well! That works as well! And beyond snowboarding, what else did I miss in your bio?Hannah: Probably one of the main things is the work I'm doing with the Green Web Foundation at the moment, and particularly the fellowship. I think you did mention a little bit the fellowship that I've just finished with them. We've been exploring the intersection of climate justice and digital technologies, which has been really, really interesting.Gaël: Could you elaborate a bit on it?Hannah: Yeah, absolutely. So I went into the fellowship having explored digital sustainability quite a bit. And I was very much focused on carbon emissions at the beginning of the fellowship. So very much looking at the energy uses of websites and thinking about optimisation and performance of websites. What the fellowship did for me is give me an opportunity to explore a much broader definition of sustainability and understand what climate justice is. It was an entirely new frame of thinking for me, not something I'd ever come across before. I'd seen it on placards, but I had not really understood what it was. And I think what I learnt really really deeply from that fellowship was that sustainability and climate justice are really complex topics. And within the digital tech sector, we have to be super careful not to try and boil these things down too simplistically because I think if we start doing that, we miss too much of the real depth within these topics. They're not black and white, they're not binary. And I think as engineers we get very used to thinking it's on or it's off. It's yes or it's no, it's black or it's white and it's not with sustainability and it's not with climate justice. It's very, very complex. You get something right on one side and you inadvertently make a problem somewhere else. I think that was one of my key takeaways and it's like, incredibly complex and that you have to be really comfortable with working in greys and you have to be really comfortable with not knowing the right answer. You can only go in a direction, take a journey and hope that that journey is going in the right way. I think that was one of my key takeaways actually. It just really shaped the way I think and feel about a lot of this stuff.Gaël: That's very interesting because engineers are not used to working in grey areas as you said, and I believe that one of the top challenges today, if we want to succeed in making the world fossil free, is to acknowledge that we need as much, if not more human engineering than purely technical ones. And this is where many people are uncomfortable, I think.Hannah: Oh, for sure. I mean, one of the things that I really explored through the fellowship was the doughnut economics model.Gaël: MmhHannah: And I've just come from the Pixel Pioneers conference last week where I presented that to a tech audience for the first time. It was really, really interesting. And one of the things that the doughnut economics model does is it puts humanity in the centre of the story of sustainability. It has a social foundation and that is the centre of the doughnut, and then the ecological considerations of the outer circle of doughnut. And my take away from, you know, the way I ended that talk was “sustainability is not a tool or a code problem. It's a human problem.” We have to human better if we're going to make a more sustainable world. And I mean, I'm definitely an engineer. I want clarity. I want yes - no answers. I want to know my code is working or my code isn't working. I'm uncomfortable knowing that there many different ways to do something or not do something. But as you rightly said, we have to get used to that. That is actually what sustainability is about. It's first and foremost human problems. Social problems over engineering problems.Gaël: How did you become interested in sustainability in the first place? Did the sight of shrinking glaciers in the Alps play a role?Hannah: Yeah. I mean, I've always, always been interested in the planet and the environment. I love plants and I love nature. And as a kid, I was always outside. I was always mucking around in the outdoors, building dens, whatever. So I've always had this innate interest in nature and the environment, and I'm a child of the eighties. We grew up at school. We were taught about global warming as it was called then. I remember the body shop talking about deforestation of the rainforest. So I've always had this acute awareness. In my twenties, I went off to work for the Environment Agency for seven years, so I started off doing a degree in computer science and then went off to work for the Environment Agency. It's always been there for me, but I think more recently in the last sort of six or seven years… I mean you're absolutely right about glaciers. I mean, as a keen snowboarder, the places that used to have reliable snow don't have it now. You go up to Mont Blanc and see the glacier up there, and they have these signs all the way up the mountain saying, Oh, in the last 20, 30 years, this is how much the glaciers shrunk. I mean, you can't kind of get away from that. But more recently, within the tech sector, I've started to see more people talking about sustainability. So my own journey really sort of kicked off, I don't know, four or five years ago where I really started to commit loads of my time to sustainability. And it was when I started to organise the Bristol WordPress Group and I wanted the Bristol WordPress meet up to be more sustainable, and I then organised the Bristol WordCamp, which was a WordPress conference in Bristol, and I was looking for ways to make that conference more sustainable. At that time, I hadn't really thought about talks so much to do with technical sustainability. I was like way more focused on the food, the travel, the swag - a real pet hate for the amount of plastic crap people get given at conferences. So I was far more thinking about sustainability there. But I put the word out asking for anyone who would be interested in coming to do some talks on sustainability. And we had Wholegrain Digital. They came along and did a talk for us. And that was in May 2019. And they talked about designing websites to be greener. That was one of the first times I really heard about this stuff. And then So that was in May. And then that June, I went to wordcamp Europe in… It must have been in Belgrade, I think. What was it? No, no. Sorry. It must have been in Berlin. I went to wordcamp Berlin, and Jack Lennox was on the main stage giving a big talk about digital sustainability. I think his talk was called “Is digital killing the planet” or “How to make websites that don't kill the planet”? That was my absolute Aha lightbulb moment that digital tech had a massive issue and has a massive call to action around sustainability.Gaël: And now you're the onge giving these talks.Hannah: Yeah, I guess I found my niche, my call to action. I've realised that there aren't enough voices in this space. I actually mentioned going to wordcamp Europe in Belgrade. So that was in 2018. That was the first time I've ever been to like a whopping great big conference. And I remember going to that conference and thinking not a single person is talking about sustainability at this conference.Gaël: It still happens a lot.Hannah: Oh, ma'am, it does, but it's better. It is better. But I thought, Hang on. How can the world's biggest tech community not have a single talk or workshop or mention of planetary sustainability issues? Remember thinking all right, back in 2018, I was like, OK, I want to do something about this. Hence the effort I was putting into my own conference that I was organising in Bristol and then, thankfully, Wholegrain Digital and Jack came along the year after and really kind of helped me realise what I could be talking about or should be talking about.Gaël: Let's talk about what you talk and especially, you know, Green IO is about sharing hands on experience on how to make the Web and take more sustainable. And I wanted to ask you a question. Could you pick one project which you did recently on WordPress, as a perfect blueprint for someone willing to build a low carbon website?Hannah: Mm. That is a really, really good question. I don't think I can give you a single project that is a perfect example of what you can achieve with digital sustainability. I don't think any client has ever come to me with the perfect amount of budget or the perfect amount of human resource to work on such a project with me. But what we can definitely talk through though, is some different scenarios in which I have done that work. But nothing to my mind has ever been perfect in that respect.Gaël: Nothing is fully black and white, I guess.Hannah: Beautifully done. Yes, absolutely. Coming back to that initial point. We don't live in a perfect world, and we're in shades of grey, but there's some interesting things we can definitely talk about.Gaël: So let's go for them.Hannah: Okay, so one project that we can definitely talk about is Branch magazine, which is a really interesting project run by the Green Web Foundation. And what that website does is it shows you a different view of the website, depending on the grids carbon intensity for that day. So it's a really interesting showcase of responsive, super responsive websites. The way it does that is it uses a data set from the national grid to the UK data set and if there's loads of solar and renewables on the grid that day, it shows you more images, more high definition images. And actually, do you know what? It was Jack Lennox that actually set up the foundation for that, and I was quite intimidated. I was like… Oh, my God!..like I'm never going to understand what Jack has done because Jack is a really great developer. This is going to be actually super complicated. It's really not. I was really surprised, like a lot of it was done with JavaScript, and the other thing that's built into that website as well is a really heavy use of caching using the redis object cache and the cool thing about that is it set up on the server and essentially, it's turning WordPress into a set of static HTML files. WordPress. That site is basically a simple blog. It's articles. There's nothing much interactive there. So it's a perfect example of what you can do with a WordPress site to make it more sustainable, to make it use a whole heap less energy per page load. Also, I should mention if you haven't seen Branch magazine, check it out because the content is super good and a big shout out to Michelle Thorne because she's brilliant. She's such a good curators of interesting content.Gaël: Yes, she is. Well, that's very interesting what you mentioned with WordPress and its static site, because that was one of the questions I wanted to ask you -That, okay, it seems that some WordPress projects can be sustainable at heart, and I wanted to ask you what's your position on the debate: SSG versus SSR like WordPress? And for the listeners not fully familiar with the topic, a static site is a website hosted fully on a content delivery network or CDN. That means that it does need a server to render the page. When people visit a static site, the closer CDN to the user responses with a basic HTML file. A static site generator is a tool that helps build such static site pages. And, on the other end, sever-side rendering solutions, which today power most of the web - they build a page on demand each time a user visits the site while SSG does it at build time. And the advantage, of course, is that the pages are always up-to-date. But every page view triggers a call to the APIs, hence a bigger environmental footprint. So what is your take on it? Is it a false debate? Is it a debate we need to have?Hannah: Oh, interesting. I mean, there's no denying that static sites are better. They are better for reducing the amount of energy use and they're quicker as well. So that's definitely a good thing. In my mind, there's kind of no debate to be had there. The facts on that are absolutely undeniable. But I think as I mentioned when I was talking through Branch magazine, static sites can start to become a little bit unstuck when you've got lots of content going up all the time where you've got dynamic interactions such as using forms or shopping online, they're not quite the right tool for the job in those sorts of situations. WordPress has a business within the ecosystem called Strattic, who have been developing ways of turning WordPress into a static site generator. And the issue is that when you edit stuff, what happens to the content? How often do you refresh the whole build of the site in order to create the static files? And I think that's been the big issue that Strattic have been grappling with - how does the site know when to refresh all the HTML files? Because if you make a typo on a page and you change that, you don't want your entire site to rebuild, which is what some static site generators do. So there's you know this idea of kind of how often and how do your files get re-cached essentially or recreated into static files? You know, if you make a change to the nav, top nav, all your files have got to update, and you know you maybe sort of get into a conversation about “Is that a good idea?” “How sustainable is that?” Especially if you've got a team of 10 people making changes all the time, then you're just constantly recreating all the files. I think for a site that is large and what I mean by large, I mean has a lot of visitors, it's a really good option to look into. I really, really do think that static site generators and making WordPress do more of this stuff out of the box, it's got to be the future direction for us to go in. I really, really do. And I'd love to see us talking about that more within the WordPress community. At the moment, the conversation seems to be, well, you're not using WordPress well, you're stupid, you should be using static site generators instead. Here's a load of other CMSs that do that for you? And I kind of think again, you know folks, it's not black and white. It's not one or the other. We can kind of get WordPress to do some of this for us or start to move in that direction as well. We don't necessarily have to switch CMS in order to achieve that.Gaël: And I reckon this not black and white position of yours is kind of rooted in the way you work on a daily basis with small medium businesses. They don't have, like, the biggest budget possible that will enable them to do a big migration every two years to change the entire technology stack. So maybe this is also where you could provide us a bit of a feedback regarding how do you help these kinds of customers using WordPress becoming greener without having the means of, you know, multi-billion unicorns companies obviously?Hannah: Absolutely. And I think I mean most, a lot of people in the WordPress space are working with SMEs working with small to medium enterprises. So I mean, at the moment, I've got one client. We are still using the WordPress Classic editor. So, we haven't switched to the Gutenberg stuff. Their site theme is Oh, my gosh. We must be approaching eight or nine years old with that. Do you know what? Gaël, it still works. We can still deliver what we need to deliver. The developer in me is desperate to re-engineer it all but the sustainability advocate in me is quite happy to keep working with them on a step by step iterative basis to keep what we've got going. So one of the big things I've been doing with them is helping them get their heads around images. Small to medium businesses don't often - the people within those businesses perhaps don't often - have a dedicated content manager. It will be, you know, a number of different people from within the business adding content. So, getting the images, you know, media is one of the biggest causes of your file size to grow. And actually, what we want to be doing is keeping the file size of each page load as small as possible. And images are a fantastic focal point for making massive, massive reductions. So one of the things I've been doing is helping them learn how to optimize their images, helping them learn when a 2000 pixel wide image is appropriate and when it is not. And I've also done a few things on the back end to help change those images, say to Web P format. So, I love to use a plug in called Smush. I also like to use a plug in called short pixel in order to convert images automatically to smaller formats. You can't just upload Web P images directly to WordPress because if you do that, you've got backwards compatibility issues. Putting plugins in place helps do that on the fly.Gaël: And what about video?Hannah: So video is massive for file size, as I'm sure many people will be aware. So auto playing videos are just a no! no! Like please, can we just not have auto playing videos unless there's a really, really important reason for it? But auto playing videos people don't like them. You know you're on the train or you're at a cafe, and suddenly you've got a video playing. Nobody really likes that experience. And the other thing is, it just sucks up loads of bandwidth and therefore electricity almost straight away. So auto playing videos are a big red cross. Do you know what? I'm not generally binary about things. This is definitely a theme of our conversation. But you know what? When it comes to playing videos, I actually would just say that's a big red cross. Don't do it. Full stop. Find a better way. And otherwise animated gifs. So this client has got a very, very old website. I've been using a tool called Cabin Analytics and I've plugged cabin analytics into the site to help me see what are the biggest pages in terms of file size. I found this one page that was like eight megabytes. I was like, okay, wow, what's going on here? Like that's quite large, because everything else is generally 1.5 to 2 which is bigger than we'd like but, you know, we've got to be pragmatic about what we're doing. I was like: OK, this is a massive outlier - the eight meg. What's going on here? And basically I'd realised that they had embedded an animated GIF into the page and it was massive. It was like a 1200 pixel wide animated GIF. And it was nice but it wasn't really doing much. I kind of said to them: Hey folks! You know, if you realise this is basically six megabytes, that's loading every single time that someone views that page and they went on, we did wonder why it was slow we hadn't realised. And so all we did was swap that out for a static image. And now we've got that page back down to more like two again, which is, you know, better, definitely much better.Gaël: That's a very interesting point, because the last green IO episode with Chris Adams, you know, focused a lot on hosting and infrastructure etc. and green powering, the data centres etc. but everything starts with design. The greenest possible Watt is a negaWatt.Hannah: So I'm glad that Chris was on that previous episode. Because just before I sort of answer your question, one of the quick, quick and easy wins for any SME is switching from a hosting provider to a hosting provider that runs on green energy. And it sounds like you and Chris have had a really good conversation about that. So we can park that for now and direct everyone to listen to that episode with you and Chris. In terms of design, fonts is a really big one that people can think about. Custom fonts are very nice, very beautiful, but they do slow the performance of the site down and can add quite a bit of page weight in. So I would say to people, try and limit your use of fonts. If you can use the system font for the text, great! And maybe reserve the more beautiful artistic fonts, perhaps for your headings, where it will matter where it will really make a big difference. So fonts is definitely something useful to look at. We've talked about images. Big images that take up the whole of the screen are a real problem because we have screens these days that are huge, absolutely enormous. My screen, my main one that I use is 2400 pixels. So if you want to deliver a nice, full screen image to someone using a screen that big, you're going to have to put in a really massive image. And unfortunately, Gutenberg isn't really helping us at the moment with something called image source set. I won't get into it now because it's more of a developer question than a techy, than a design question. But it means we're in a slightly harder position for delivering more responsibly sized images. It's kind of one of my bugbears for Gutenberg and what WordPress has done with that. So we want to, you know, you might have a justification for a massive image across the screen somewhere. But if every single page has it and maybe several of them across a page, I think you're going to give yourself some sort of sustainability headaches basically. It's really cool seeing the recent trend with designers doing more with SVG and Vector based graphics and even drawing things with CSS as well. And that can be a really great way of creating interest across a wide part of the screen estate, but without having images. So that's definitely something worth looking into as well. And then I think the last thing is “Search”. Don't be afraid to incorporate search into the design of websites. Search is actually really good value in terms of the amount of energy it uses to conduct a search. If you think that somebody's coming on your site to look for a particular piece of content, if they have to load five or six pages in order to find what they're looking for, that's quite a lot of wasted data transfer. But actually, if you use a search filter, sorry, a search mechanism, someone can find what they're looking for a lot more quickly. And I think in design search is a real saviour actually. Yes, there's a back end implication for someone running that search on the service side. But again, such results don't use a huge amount of energy if you've got a well optimized search function in the site. WordPress search function is okay. You can definitely optimize it and make it better. So that would be my fourth pillar: stick search on your site. It doesn't cost as much as you might think it does and it will really help your users.Gaël: So in a nutshell, if I dare to wrap up what you've said, you will have four pillars which are images, video, font and search. And I would say more generally speaking the way we use CMS today are, most of the time, not sustainable but the tool itself remains very, very powerful, if used properly. With these changes you talked about in design, but also in hosting and even in deployment. Am I getting it right?Hannah: I think so. I think it's very hard to say WordPress is or isn't sustainable. As you know, it is about how someone uses the tool and how the tool is set up. I think another really important factor to consider with the choice of CMS is around how backwards compatible the software is. And I think that's something we haven't really touched on in this conversation. WordPress has been around for a long time. It's just had its… is it 15th or 16th birthday? And that in itself makes it a sustainable choice. The fact that it's been around for a long time, the fact that a website has been able to run on WordPress for 15 or 16 years and hasn't had to re platform, that's not just an energy cost to re platform. It's also a human cost. You've got to get your head around a new platform, you've got to rebuild all your content. So I think there is also an argument to say that, you know, if you look at it from that angle, WordPress is actually doing remarkably well for sustainability.Gaël: And the WordPress community has now a dedicated Slack channel on sustainability and it has already been joined by I guess almost 100 people. So thanks a lot to all of them.Hannah: Would you know the people that were behind it? So, it's Nora Ferreiros who is a Spanish wordpress designer. She came to one of those workshops that I run, Gaël, which is where I met you where we are exploring a wider view of sustainability. So Nora came along to the third of my workshops and she was brave enough to stand up in front of everybody at WordCamp Europe which just happened in Porto and asked the directors, Matt and Josephina, questions about sustainability. And kudos to her because that could have been something quite a bit scary but she started something there. So, well done Nora! And I think it's been bubbling up for a while. That was going to happen. So, I'm really chaffed. Well done WordPress!Gaël: Indeed. Hannah, you are a pillar in both the Climate Action Tech and the Green Web Foundation communities. Hence, I would say, a privileged witness of the ongoing trends in digital sustainability. And I'd love to get your perspective on them and to start the discussion you mentioned in an episode of the podcast “This is Human Centred Design” that developers need to slow down to be less engineer and more craftsman. Could you elaborate?Hannah: Absolutely. I think that, so I've been teaching at a coding boot camp for a few years. Unfortunately, in the pandemic, the boot camp closed down. But what I observed in that boot camp was just how phenomenally hard it is for any new developer to get up to speed with all the tools and everything that we have available to us, as developers. It's kind of an impossible task if you're at ground zero and you're trying to learn it all. And I would also say, as a developer myself, trying to keep on top of all this change, all these new ideas, all these new tools that are coming out. I mean, it's a day job in itself, just keeping on top. Let alone, you know, actually learning how to use them and developing the skills. And I have to sort of take a step back and just ask myself: What are we doing here? Why are we creating so much new stuff but more specifically throwing away stuff that we've built new tools, new frameworks and things like that? Why? Why do we have this mentality within tech that we need to keep throwing stuff away and creating new stuff all the time? Can we not just, like, slow down a bit, and let people come on the journey with us and let people learn these things? Can we give tools a little bit more settling time to actually find their place? I think within the tech industry, we've just sort of forgotten how to slow down a bit, and I think there are so many negative impacts as a result of us moving too fast. I think it locks too many people out of joining in. So, it's essentially a form of gatekeeping. I think… this speed with which we move.Gaël: And it's funny because what you've just said really resonates with a very famous speech that Uncle Bob gave. It was already… several years ago about the fact that our industry was doomed to be a junior industry and that it was going to create a lot of issues, because when you've got too many junior people in a position, obviously the quality is not here, and you can have dire consequences. His reasoning was a bit different of yours, which was that we had such needs, increasing needs, in the number of developers across the globe that even if you train them, you always need to hire new ones and that will be only junior ones. And now it really resonates that actually this is still absolutely true, and a big kudos to him up to have dared saying something like that. But actually, if you add what you've just said with his opinion, it's kind of complementary in the wrong way that we have to hire a lot of junior people because the demand is just crazy for code everywhere, and on top of that, we don't help them to be productive super soon and to be efficient and to be able to keep up because we load them over and over with new technologies, etcetera, that we could really question sometimes, whether it's just pure hype or something very valuable.Hannah: Yeah, you said that so well. Did you say it was Uncle Bob?Gaël: Absolutely.Hannah: Thank you,Gaël. That is something for me to have a look at there. It's a people issue, and I do think this is why we have such issues with imposter syndrome in the industry as well. It's so hard to feel good at anything because the minute you get good at something, it's all changed again. And for what? I just… I don't know, is it? I think part of it is a bit of an ego thing, and part of it is a bit of a…I don't know, people don't like the way some things are done, so they're just going to go off and do it the way that they want to do it. And to some degree, that's good. That's innovation. That's to be celebrated. But in some other ways, if we all just slow down, we could spend more time learning what someone else has built and learn how to use that tool ourselves, rather than having to create another flavour of it or another version of it. And this comes back to my point about why I celebrate WordPress. Why I'm actually incredibly proud to tell people that I work in WordPress because WordPress has been around a long time. WordPress gets a bit of flack for being slow to change and slow to develop new features. It's not exciting. It's not seen as exciting because it's not constantly changing. I actually think that's something to really celebrate and to really treasure. I have a website that's been running on WordPress for eight years. It's the same thing that was built eight years ago and only with a few small modifications that still works today. There's not many frameworks that you can say that's the case for.Gaël: Thanks, Anna, for sharing your insights and, more generally, what are the latest evolution that you see in digital sustainability?Hannah: I think at the moment there's a really interesting school, a new discipline, I suppose, new school of thinking called sustainable software engineering. I think that's a really interesting trend. So you know, I was mentioning about Branch magazine how it actually uses the data from the grid as to how carbon intense electricity is at a given point of time. There's a really interesting field there. I'm looking at perhaps more service side, service side operations and shifting operations around different times of day, different times a week, different times of year, depending on how much energy is coming onto the grid at one time. I think that's absolutely fascinating and a really interesting trend, and I think another trend I would like to see, I'd like to see us connecting humanity with technology a lot, lot more. I think it's starting to happen. But I think in terms of the trend that we need to see within sustainability, that's what we need to see. This connection of human and tech and humans being at the centre of all the tech that we're building, not the engineering mentality. So it would be good to see that happening more.Gaël: And are you optimistic today about both of these trends happening?Hannah: True to false? I cannot answer yes or no because in some respects I am optimistic.Gaël: That's the entire idea of this episode. That… no black, no white, it's all grey.Hannah: No black. No white. Exactly, it's all grey. So I am really optimistic to see so much effort, so much willingness, go into developing sustainable software engineering and the Green Software Foundation are doing a fantastic job there. I'm optimistic about that. What I'm worried about, though, is that engineers are going to continue to try and optimize things that shouldn't exist and things that we don't actually need. e.g. There are a whole raft of digital text things that exist that I just think if we really care about sustainability, we'd just switch them off. I've got to say the Metaverse that Facebook are developing is one of those things for me. We can optimize that until we're blue in the face, but I'm actually not sure that that should exist at all.Gaël: That's a very interesting comment you just made, because I love to ask a question that I call the Beyond scope 3 question, which is always a bit hard to answer, which is what about the Why? And my point is, did you find yourself in situations where making tech greener was not enough? Where you had to question the purpose of some digital services to be built, if not, an entire company? Do you sometimes refuse to work for some company and you mention Wholegrain Digital? And that's very interesting because Tom Greenwood, in an episode of the “Techologie” podcast, one of the very first podcasts about Digital Sustainability, mostly in French but a great great podcast, he explained how Wholegrain Digital would actually score all of his potential customers to agree or not to work with them? So what about you? Did you find yourself in such a situation that you had to say no to a customer because of this “Why” question?Hannah: 100%. Absolutely. I think perhaps my process is not nearly as robust as Wholegrain Digital's because it's just me.Gaël: Well, that explains a lot, and you're one woman show so... You don't have please do not to create big processes.Hannah: No, that wouldn't be very sustainable at all. But no, I mean, that has always been central to my thinking ever since I started as a freelancer, you know, all these people that I want to work with. Do I care about their cause? Do I feel that I could be using my skills to further something that I don't believe in or don't think should exist? I mean, absolutely! I think that's really a really important thing to do. Digital tech people, we have skills to accelerate solutions. That's essentially what we're doing. We're accelerating processes and systems that could exist without our digital tech skills. So we have to think, what are we accelerating and why? So I think it's a really, really important question for us as techies to think about.Gaël: I do think so as well. Hannah being mindful of time I would like to close the podcast with one final question, which is - what will be your recommendations to learn more about Digital Sustainability and Green Tech? I know that we didn't speak that much about Green Tech, but that's a subject keen to your heart. It could be books, people to follow, videos, conferences, et cetera.Hannah: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think there's lots and lots of resources out there. I mean, one of the things that I run is Green Tech South West, which is a meet up specifically designed to grow people's awareness of what is possible out there and grow their awareness around what sustainability means. I'm obviously going to give a shout out for that.Gaël: And you should.Hannah: Yeah, we run our events online and so even if we have an in person event, we always have an online option for people to join in and listen to our awesome speakers that way. So I'd say there's Green Tech South West. I think a lot of the work that we're doing through the Green Web Foundation as well is super interesting. And I mean, I just have to give a massive show out to the ClimateAction.tech community. If you're really interested in kind of seeing what people are talking about, meeting people, finding out about what's going on within this sector, I think you can't do any better than joining the ClimateAction tech community and really getting involved. You know, there's a running Meetups. There's lots of great discussion on Slack, and there's lots of super interesting people you can meet as well. And Gaël, I think you and I met through Climate Action Tech.Gaël: Absolutely. That must be half of my podcast guests, so far.Hannah: Absolutely. And I mean, I know on your show, you're also interviewing a lot of really interesting people. I think if you want a warts and all real stark view of what's happening within the digital tech sector, I don't think you can follow anyone better than Gerry McGovern. I think Gerry is absolutely brilliant. He just says it how it is. There's no sugar coating. Gerry is just an absolute fantastic mirror to reflect back what is going wrong within our sector. So I definitely say follow Gerry if you want to learn more about what's going wrong.Gaël: This is what Fershad said. I think. He opened his interview talking about Gerry’s book being an eye opener. Thanks a lot, Hannah. That was a great ride. Not a one on snow, but toward a greener digital world.Hannah: Oh sad... It's lovely to come and talk to you Gaël: Thanks a lot. I'm sure many of our listeners will find inspiration to green the web, starting with this very pragmatic and efficient way to use WordPress, but also the way you take a step back and look at the entire picture on how we do our job, what the tech does, should do and should not do anymore to our society. So that was very, very useful and thanks a lot for taking the time to be with us. That was great. Thanks a lot, Hannah.Hannah: Absolute pleasure, Gaël. Thank you for inviting me and thank you for everything that you're doing in this space as well. It's really great. I love your podcast.Gaël: Thanks. And for our next episode, we will go back to Berlin and meet Chris Adams again for the long overdue second part of his interview. The executive director of the Green Web Foundation will tell us more on the latest trends in digital sustainability and all the initiatives popping up around the world. And that's it. Thank you all for listening to Green IO. If you have liked this episode, please share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who would enjoy or learn from it. Green IO being a non-profit podcast, our dear listeners are true communication power, and you are a scout as well. So feel free to share with me your idea for new guests who want to make our digital world greener one byte at a time. ❤️ Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like. 📧 Our Green IO monthly newsletter is also a good way to be notified, as well as getting carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents.

Jun 7, 2022 • 33min

#4.a - Chris Adams - A fossil-free internet by 2030? How to deploy Green Hosting and Cloud Sustainability to achieve it?

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