The Week in Green Software: Calculating Software Emissions with Navveen Balani & Srini Rakhunathan

Environment Variables

Host Asim Hussain is joined by two of only a handful of people to try and calculate the emissions of software; Navveen Balani of Accenture and Srini Rakhunathan of Microsoft. In this episode of TWiGS Navveen does a deep dive into the processes behind Accenture’s use of the SCI Specification to calculate a measure to track and, ultimately, reduce the carbon emissions of one of its internal reference applications. Asim also quizzes Srini on the upcoming CarbonQL project by the Green Software Foundation which Srini is leading. We also get some links to great resources (particularly for UX folk) and some exciting event news!

Learn more about our people:

• Asim Hussain: LinkedIn / Twitter
• Navveen Balani: LinkedIn
• Srini Rakhunathan: LinkedIn

Find out more about the GSF:

• The Green Software Foundation Website
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter

News:

• How Accenture Implemented the SCI Specification Score to Track Software Emissions / GSF [2:59]
• CarbonQL / GSF [19:49]
• Powershell Module For Watttime Emission Data / Watttime [25:15]

Events:

• GSF London Meetup (Thursday, March 23 at 6-9pm GMT) / GSF [30:12]

Resources:

• Circa by Andy Wood (part of the Carbon Hack ‘22) / GSF[26:56]
• Sustainable Design Toolkits for UX Designers: / Vitaly Friedman [27:33]
• Sustainable UI (part of the Carbon Hack ‘22) / GSF [28:27]
• Green Jobs Network / greenjobs.net [31:52]
• Branch Magazine / climateaction.tech [34:04]
• lowwwcarbon.com [34:32]

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Watch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!
• Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!
  

Transcript Below:

Asim Hussain: Oh my God, that's an interesting way of looking at what we're doing. Like we can't actually, like we're not doing the work ourselves just piling onto the DevOps people to fix all of our coding problems

Navveen Balani: it's a, I call it as a journey from DevOps to GreenOps, so finops and so on. Yeah. So integrate all of these and then get a highly sustainable software

Asim Hussain: as long as it's not my ops, as long as it's somebody else's ops, it's not my problem only joking.

Hello and welcome to Environment Variables. Brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software and your host Asim Hussain.

Welcome to The Week in Green Software, or TWiGS. Where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development, I'm your host, Asim Hussain. Today we'll be discussing the latest development from a bunch of people, but on the call we've got Navveen from Accenture. We're gonna talk about some of the work that they've been doing calculating carbon emissions are using what's called the SCI specification, which we've been developing, the Green Software Foundation, and we'll also be sharing some valuable resources and some exciting events to do with the world of green software. Before we begin, let me introduce our guest for the episode of TWiGS, with us today, we have Navveen.

Navveen Balani: Hi everyone. I'm Navveen Balani. I'm a chief technologist with the Technology Sustainability Innovation Group at Accenture. Very excited to be here. I look at innovation and creating assets at the intersection of technology and sustainability. I'm also a Google Cloud certified fellow and a published author with several technology books.

Asim Hussain: Wonderful. Yeah, I did discover just how many books Navveen has been writing. You just, you go to his Amazon profile, there's quite a few there. I know how hard it's write one book, Navveen, so I'm quite impressed. Oh, it's you.

Srini Rakhunathan: Hi, I'm Srini. I'm with Microsoft and I'm working for the sustainability division of Microsoft. Sustainable Software is something that, that, it was just a spark about three years back in January when the goals around carbon emissions were announced, and I immediately wanted to do something within the consulting space for which I was part of at Microsoft, but I'm happy to be here.

And then Greens Software has started and I've been with them since I think the beginning and as far my interest with green software is going, I like to write a lot of blog articles because they're small and probably can finish it within a couple of weeks. A little lazy that way. But yeah, it's been exciting working with GSF, the different groups and I just look forward to learning a lot from this initiative.

Asim Hussain: Wonderful. It's great. It's great to have you both here and you've both been involved in green software since before the foundation were born. You've both been involved since day one of the foundation, so yeah, really appreciate it. So let's go with the news. Let's start off with the first piece of news.

So this is an a piece on our website, which is called How Accenture implemented the SCI Specification score to track software emission. We were gonna cover this last week, but we figured it made more sense to wait till this week so we could be joined by Navveen because Navveen, you work at Accenture and you are one of the authors of this post.

So yeah. Why don't you tell us people a little bit about what the article's about, and I'd love to know what were some of the challenges you faced while trying to calculate the SCI specification. Just very quickly, just explain to everybody, and the SCI is something called a Software Carbon Intensity specification, and it's a specification being developed by the Green Software Foundation to measure carbon emissions of software.

So yeah, over to Navveen.

Navveen Balani: Thank you Asim. The SCI provided us with a practical methodology to baseline carbon emissions offer software application included embodied emissions and reducing the same. And when we started realizing the SCI specification, we found out getting accurate data for energy and embodied emissions was quite challenging.

And as we were deploying the application on cloud, many of these details were abstracted by the cloud vendors. . So we had to change our focus from getting accurate data to probably approximations and work towards getting a baseline for our SES code. And once we had the SES code, we basically have a value to track.

And as long as you use the same approximation, you could easily identify what caused the reduction in GI code, for instance, did you change the code to be more energy efficient? Or you did hardware optimizations and based on hard hardware optimizations, the energy estimation got reduced. So with SCI and using this SCIis a score, we were able to in our carbon emissions and once we had the score, we went about with various reduction techniques.

Asim Hussain: So you basically, you calculated the SCI score using a type of ar, like a reference architecture. Could you describe the type of application that you were trying to calculate a score for?

Navveen Balani: Yeah, so our reference architecture was basically a three tier application, which was deployed in the cloud we had using the interfaces create created using Web application. At the backend, we have developed all the application code was available as a set of containers, which was deployed on a container management.

We had an API gateway, which all communications happened to the API gateway. And at the backend we had a few databases and no SQL and SQL databases, which stored the data for the application as well as alt-text information. And then we have other cross-cutting concerns like security logging, right, which is provided by the cloud vendors.

Asim Hussain: So it's basically like the, this is, this is about 95% of all applications in the world. Is this basically right apart from a database, an api and some compute using one mechanism or another, virtualized machines or something else. And you mentioned earlier, earlier cause you, because I think the, the thing you mentioned at the start is the thing that comes up all the time, which is a data problem.

It's a data problem. I think it's a problem that we've, we three have discussed for quite a while now. So what were the solutions like, how did you solve the data problem to be, to be good enough for you? As in like how did you solve getting good enough data for you?

Navveen Balani: Yeah, getting data was a challenge because. Most of the data right, is currently not available, or I will say really available. So we have to look at certain approximations. For instance, the first was around energy calculation and the various approaches to calculate energy curves. Some are based on coefficient values, like how many Watt Hours it would take to run a virtual machine.

Some are based on statistical methods and some provide methodology through a set of APIs. And most of the energy calculation strategies are based on certain approximations, so there is no single source of truth. And the intent here is to basically use the same methodology for any future calculation. So you could actually have a baseline and then you use the same approach again and again to find out the SCI score.

Asim Hussain: So when you say an energy curve, you are talking about trying to calculate how much energy is actually consumed by a CPU because it's a curve, right? It's not linear. It's a curve. Yeah. And what did you land on in the end? So what, which solution did you land on in the end? You mentioned a couple of solutions there.

Navveen Balani: We went ahead with a combination of a statistical based method and uh, APIs, which are provided through various third party sources, and we found out that we have to pick up one of the values. So we went ahead with a statistical based method, which provided in our instance, a better accuracy, I would say.

So our concern was to find out, accurate method will we end up using? Right. So statistical based gave us a good, I would say benchmark, but even if you have picked up the API method also, it was not about more about accuracy, but I think it's more about getting a value, right? So that we could unblock ourselves to arrive at an energy curve.

Asim Hussain: And so that's basically just a, just a sim- I'm, I consider myself the simplification. I'm the five year old on the call and you have to explain it. I'm asking the five year old questions. So you're basically talking about being able to provide some model with some inputs, be it. I'm guessing CPU utilization, maybe RAM usage, maybe.

It depends how much telemetry you can gather. If you can gather as much telemetry as possible, I'm passing that into a model which then just pumps out for you. Given all these inputs, we guesstimate your energy consumption is that amount because you actually don't know, like I can tell you from like Intel's perspective, I'm with Intel now, so I can tell you from Intel's perspective, like we have certain tools, like for instance, Intel's RAPL, but Intel's RAPL only really gives you data at the socket level. The mechanical mechanism of being able to calculate electricity, we can only give it you at the socket level just cuz that's the pipe coming in and there's lots of model-

to get that to the process level, you have to do lots of modeling to try and figure out how much of that incoming value do we partition off to all the processes running on a machine. So at some level you always have to use statistical modeling, even if you've got like a direct measuring capability. I'd say yeah.

Navveen Balani: So, yeah, as you pointed out, right? So it was as long as you can get telemetry data, whether it's CPU, Memory usage, storage utilization, network input, and output bites. Right? You should then convert it into some energy curves, some statistical models, and get a value, which is, yeah, which is your energy curve.

Asim Hussain: So what, let me ask you another question. So Srini, you and Navveen are just, there's a rare set of people in this world who've actually tried to calculate the emissions of software. I think you, there's probably, I used to say there's only two or three people who've ever attempted it, and now it's probably more like 10, 12.

But there's a small like limited skillset. So, and I'll start with you Navveen. I'll ask Srini as well. So what are your key takeaways from implementing something like the SCI specification?

Navveen Balani: Yeah, so that's a great question. So I would say we had three key takeaways from this case study one was around energy calculation, and as I mentioned, there were various approaches for calculating energy curves and there was no single source of truth. And the intent here was to use some method for future calculations to compare against the baseline.

And we documented the various approaches as part of the SCI Guide project, which I worked with Srini. And this can be a starting point for all software practitioners to calculate energy of this software system, whether it's using surgical methods, coefficient, or API-based technique. The second takeaway was around embodied emissions.

So the type of underlying hardware for running virtual machines and it's embodied emissions are currently abstracted by the cloud vendors. And we had to rely on certain approximations based on VM-type to calculate the embody emissions. And we relied on sources from the cloud carbon footprint, which had an Excel, which talked about for a given virtual VM type, what is the scope three emissions.

And there's similar study from Vista also, which talks about the cal- scope three emissions for a given hardware type. And third was around the cloud managed services. Uh, so there were certain managed services and shared services like the API gateway, load balancer, where the type of hardware is not listed by the cloud vendor.

In certain scenarios, we had to rely on certain approximation like we did with API gateway. We just assumed that 5% of our total carbon emissions goes to API gateway. And for serverless components, we relied on, uh, using, uh, a timeshare approximation and the utilization to come up with a carbon emission score.

Asim Hussain: So you just, for serverless, you just assumed it was like a normal workload, but the just your time shared it just cuz underneath it's a normal workload. It's a normal server that's been using it underneath. There is a server

Navveen Balani: that's right. So we wanted to attribute some value to it because we thought, okay, maybe a 5%, uh, based on our overall load might make sense to at least give some emission value to the API gateway.

Asim Hussain: Yeah. Good takeaways. Srini as somebody else who's been calculating SCI scores for a while, do you have any other takeaways from your experience implementing SCI scores that you think might be useful for other people to know?

Srini Rakhunathan: Definitely. Thanks for the question. I think I completely echo what Naveen said about learning how to do embodied emission calculations as well as for serverless. Other couple of things that comes to my mind, the first takeaway I would say is from a, the case study that I picked up was very similar to what Navveen was talking about.

Mine was a managed services set of application. I managed set of services combining to form a website. It's as simple as that. We had a Web application, you had a middle. I didn't even have an api. All that I had was a direct database, but to make things simple for me I chose managed services from a deployment standpoint, but from a calculation standpoint, it's the most hardest thing because a lot of abstraction is happening under the hood in terms of the, like Navveen has said, the database server, the front end server, and also if you talk about real production application.

You have replication. You have active configurations, active passive configurations. So the first takeaway that for me was from an infrastructure standpoint, the complexities around the deployment will we take into account the development machines that help build that infrastructure in the place? What should be included?

What should be excluded? So for me, the first and foremost thing is to define or be very clear. Around your software boundary, and that's where you need to make it iterative. Try not to boil the ocean in the first place. Say I've included everything. No, that's not how it works. Right? You need to iteratively keep adding and your calculation also ends up becoming iterative.

Second takeaway I would say is the networking piece, which was, I think we have talked about it enough in many of our group calls. It may sound the easiest to measure, but the most difficult to calculate. I can just go in and say, this is my data in, this is my data out in bytes. Hey, gimme the number. There's no reference number at all.

There's no reference multiplication factor that you can use. So I believe there are lots of studies going on and this is an area where we could do a lot, we could, we could invest in a lot of academic research to figure out what would be the best way to do this. And third, I think for me a revelation was I needed to brush up on my high school physics.

I needed to understand what's energy, what's power, what's joules. It's very important. It's just not software development anymore. If you talk about sustainable software, you need to know your basics, and so you should study.

Asim Hussain: I can tell you somebody's moved from like software development at Microsoft to Intel. I ask questions, which I think are just, I'm expecting an answer oh code it this way. Half my answers involve the word voltage. It's somewhere in the answer, and I'm like, whew. It's almost like a lost art. And I wonder if the secret to all of our world is this.

There's like a lost art to programming back in the day, like what you described, and I talked to a lot of people at Intel who, who write software at the very low level. And the understanding of what you're saying is inherent, it's natural. We've become so abstracted away and the abstractions are useful because make for faster development, but there is a nature of understanding how the discipline programmer in silicon has become quite distant.

Whereas if that reduced, that'll be something I think that interestingly might help us in our space. I've been thinking about this. I don't know if I've spoken to both of you about this yet, but this idea that I've had around, like you mentioned, software boundary Srini, and that's something we've spoken about a lot.

I know Navveen, you've been driving a project for a while now. The SCIentology, which I, I think we should change that name. Navveen. It's just the suggestion cuz it's SCIentology. But anyway, you've been driving a project around like when someone saves my application. What do they mean? What do you include in an application and what do you not include in application?

Because one of the things I've seen historically when people publish carbon footprints for applications is they conveniently cut out bits that they are either just inconvenient to calculate, but they are part of your application boundary. Like I've been thinking a lot more about monitoring. The monitoring of an application, like when you have these larger applications, you're monitoring all these different components of your software product.

You're monitoring the database, you're monitoring the front end, you're monitoring this, you're monitoring that, and I've been having this idea that what if you defined your software boundaries, everything that you're, if you care enough about some software component to monitor it, is that philosophically part of your software application? Does that make sense what I'm saying here right now?

Srini Rakhunathan: Definitely. And I think if you wanna make it systemic, if you want to make your calculation systemic and repeatable, you would. That's how we do, right? When we, when we want to calculate the number of users who are actually using their application, we fall back to telemetry, we find, and that's, we use words like user journey and scenarios, et cetera, et cetera.

But then here, if you really wanna understand what are your operational emissions, you need that telemetry, you need that telemetry across the, all the software components in a system. So yeah, definitely it's, it's, it's a must have.

Navveen Balani: I also think maybe if there is a simple way to calculate operation emissions and carbons directly from the data which has already been available or gathered, the whole generation of SCI's score might be very simplified. Maybe do whatever data you have, if you are maybe proxy data, cost data and some efficient way of converting that to a score because one of the challenges I would say is going through the SCI requires a fixed set of steps, right? Defining your boundary calculations, coming up with the conversions, and so it has sequence of steps, it takes time, but any available proxy, if you are able to quickly generate a SCI score, at least some benchmark.

I think that would be an ideal scenario, and maybe it's integrated as part of your DevOps in future. So you don't need to do much, right? Just build. Get a score next release, get a score. Maybe you're not there yet, but hopefully that's the intent and direction.

Asim Hussain: It's come up a couple of times on the podcast about the GreenOps, DevSusOps, that aspect of it, and actually monitoring is part of that. That's what you think of when you think of DevOps and is it, I think it is. There's monitoring. I hope it is. Someone should be monitoring my applications. It's not me. Hope it's a DevOps people.

Maybe the DevOps people think it's me,

Navveen Balani: Now we are giving more additional responsibility to DevOps. I would say

Asim Hussain: yeah, , that's just, that's just . Oh my God. That's an interesting way of looking at what we're doing. Like we can't actually, like we're not doing the work ourselves just piling onto the DevOps people to fix all of our coding problems.

Navveen Balani: it's a, I call it as a journey from DevOps to GreenOps, so finops and so on. Yeah. So you integrate all of these and then get a highly sustainable software system.

Asim Hussain: As long, as, long as it's not MyOps. As long as it's somebody else's ops. It's not my problem, but I'm joking. So maybe let's bring it back down to an interesting, I think both of you also work on, I think I teased in a previous podcast episode this idea of something called the CarbonQL Project, which Srini you're leading, you both heavily involved in, maybe let's flip over into that and talk about this brand new project that we're launching in the foundation called CarbonQL.

Do you wanna give it a quick overview?

Srini Rakhunathan: Definitely. Thanks Asim. Again, this has been something that I'm really excited that there is going to, it's gonna change the way we look at carbon value or how are we systemically capturing monitoring data. The intent of the project is to be able to provide a value, a carbon emissions value, which you can use.

It's more for action for you to continuously iterate and figure out where are you at a particular milestone after you have taken some of the measures provided as part of the SCI specs, which is around making it more carbon aware, making it more efficient or energy efficient, or all of it. So you need a way to tell whether you have progressively made or passed your different milestones, whether you're continuously reducing or you're stagnant or you're increasing because it's always possible that you need to pull all these parameters to make sure, because we are not building applications just to make it sustainable, right? We are building applications to make money for your business.

Asim Hussain: Add value to the world, let's put it that way.

Srini Rakhunathan: Exactly, and so you need a way to easily calculate across your different hosting infrastructure, whether you do it on the cloud or on frame. You host your app on your laptop. The project aims to tap into the different data sets available. And abstract away the calculation algorithm and just provide you a value, most intelligent value.

That's what we would say when we were kickstarted it, and I think it's going good. We should probably have something really cool coming out of this. Navveen do you want to add anything?

Navveen Balani: So maybe I think CarbonQL will be a Chat GPT of Sustainable Tech. You ask questions, what is your emission for laptops? What is your emission for mobile phone? What is the emission for your CPU? What is the emission for my software boundary? You give us spec, right? So can we ask easy as you just give us spec or a software boundary or the artifacts from SCI anthology if you define something and just please provide me a emission so it can make lives easier for people who want to calculate carbon emissions and maybe provide a simplified way of getting carbon emissions be for developers. DevOps, if they're able to provide that vision and implementation. I think the calculation journey would be quite simplified and more adaptable, right to all the development community.

Asim Hussain: I think we've mentioned the chat GPT every episode for the last 10 episodes now. So it's come. It's come up again. Yeah. Just for the audience. It is not a flavor of chat GPT. You are not going to be typing in what is the carbon emissions of my three tier thing. I think what you're alluding to is there's quite a few different methodologies and data sets and models and statistical models you can use.

And are you on a laptop and maybe you want to use this model. Are you calculating from mobile phone? Maybe use this model a server, use this model or this API or this data set. And I think what I've always found is that the set of people like you, two or two, a very rare set of people who've actually sat down and calculated this stuff manually.

The knowledge that's in your head is rare. Actual, real experience. People can read like roughly theoretically how to calculate and sum it all together. But you've actually got like that real knowledge and what I see is CarbonQL is gonna try and codify that so that anybody else. Does not need to be an expert in this space.

They can just say, I'm using the greenhouse gas protocol methodology. I'm running on these types of machines. This is the telemetry I've managed together, but I don't really have all of it. And then you'll just figure out the rest and like use all of your expertise and all of your best judgment to combine all the data sets into one, which I think is, yeah, it's been the number one problem.

I've heard from everybody about the SCI since day one was data. It's really hard. There's lots of data sets out there. We don't even know if they can merge. I get this number from one dataset. I get a number from another dataset. Can I add them together? Is that possible? We don't know, so the set of people who know that is low and you're two of the sets of people who know that.

Navveen Balani: I think the data, once we have CarbonQL implemented, right? I think through the data we'll get various insights across all data sources. Maybe that might be a good way to look at the various data trends, right across all these, um, APIs and SCI, right? Whether you want to use average value or which works for a given scenario.

Asim Hussain: Yeah, I'm really excited. I'm really, really excited for this project. I think this is one of the projects we, we've, uh, it's been on the tip of our tongues for a while now. and it's just really exciting to get it and there's been a lot of interest from various organizations in the foundation from getting involved, so I'm, there's a lot of interest in this.

So really excited to see what you both and the rest of the team deliver on this front, and we'll get you on the podcast again as things get a bit more mature to talk about kind of where the progress is. Let move on now to few of the other bits of news. One other bit of news that's happened recently is a PowerShell module for Watttime emissions data.

So Watttime are one of the organizations that price carbon intensity for electricity. They are a member of the foundation. So Henry Richardson and the team at Watttime have released a PowerShell module that retrieves near real time emissions data from Watttime for a supplied Azure region during resource deployment, this is a really lightweight solution.

It utilizes the limited functionality available with one of the Watttime's free accounts. Because it is a pay, they do need to earn money, and it's not really like a real solution for reducing carbon deployments of software. I imagine to get that data, you probably should pay for the full licensed versions of the data and get the more accurate data.

But it does provide some nice real-time values to simulate the behavior of deployments and software based on emissions without the cost of a paid account. So all they need, they'll need an account on Watttime, and you'll need the AZ resources PowerShell module for Azure installed. I need to connect all to Azure account.

This is a really great free resource, which we're gonna link in the show notes. Are any of you PowerShell users? Are any of you PowerShell users? Cause I've got to admit, I am not.

Srini Rakhunathan: I have used it.

Asim Hussain: You have used it. Srini's like, I work at Microsoft. I should know I should be a PowerShell power user. But you are like how I used to be at Microsoft, which is, I don't really use SharePoint, but yeah.

Power PowerShell. Yes, I PowerShell is, it's like a command line tool from my understanding for Windows, isn't it? Yeah. So it's really exciting. Cause I know it's using a lot of DevOps scenarios. Pretty simple idea and we think so complicated about the world that we do. This is a really simple idea. Just bringing a lot of this functionality into the command line interface all by itself is, I think, quite valuable.

Navveen Balani: No, I just remember we had a similar innovation right in the hackathon that we did some something around shell trying to get carbon intensity.

Asim Hussain: Circa that was it! It was called Circa. Yeah, in the hackathon we had last year. That's a good, that's a good memory. We had a, yeah, I remember now. There was one of the submissions was Circa, it was one of my favorites and it was a command line where you typed circa. Then you type the command that you wanted to execute, and it would literally just do a sleep.

Such a simple idea, just a sleep on the command line until the electricity becomes better, and then it lets the command run. So all these simple ideas. Very, very good. So let's move to the next one. So sustainable design toolkit for UX designers. This is from Vitaly Friedman. I've met him. We, I've been, I've spoken at his Smashing Mag conference.

I've met him at quite, quite a few conferences. So Vitaly if I've got your frame name wrong. I'm really sorry. So he's released a really cool list of sustainable design toolkits for UX designers, all with practical guidelines, frameworks, and tools to focus on what matters and removes what doesn't. The list is really comprehensive and includes a UX checklist for sustainability. It looks really useful. Again the link's down the show notes. I took a quick look at it earlier on today. He posted it. If you know there's a big post on LinkedIn and there's a lot of great stuff, I get asked about this. I just got asked about it last week. I spoke at a conference and people are asking for like a UX framework.

Because a lot of what we talking about starts at the UX level. We do need to build some of this functionality. I remember what there was one, again, like coming back to the Carbon Aware Hackathon last year, there was one proposal, which I thought was really interesting, which is like carbon aware components you can put into websites.

So like a literal carbon aware, I think it was carbon video or something. You can type a HTML tag called Carbon Video. and it would play the video if it was electricity was clean and if it wasn't clean it was, I think it would just play the audio component of the video, save on energy or something like that.

So I think a lot of this stuff, it all starts really at that stage. Before you even speak to a developer, it's probably the best time to do a lot of your sustainability thinking. Did you guys have a chance to look at this? Don't worry about it. If you don't, UX is for the other folks.

Navveen Balani: I think given how the UX will evolve, right? Particularly new interfaces maybe in Metaverse, right? I don't know. We will have a lot of thinking to do to decarbonize the entire UX story. Not now. Maybe when you see a lot of emissions where everything is virtual. I don't know what kind of carbon emissions we would have, right?

Maybe five years, 10 years down the line.

Asim Hussain: Yeah. Yeah. Very interesting point. Or may, maybe the only interface with how five years down the line is a version of GPT that just work GPT or your laptop just opens up and it's a chat GPT, like command line at the bottom and that's it. There's nothing else left for us to do, do my work for the day.

You know, I joke about this, I had to hunt around for it, but I actually found. Four years ago I was giving a talk. I think I tricked an audience into thinking I'd built an AI that could make a website. From a textural description, I tricked the audience. And then just last week it happened, and now the chat GPT four can see a picture of a website and code it for you.

So I, I wonder how long we've got left. Probably not as long as we think, but while we're here, let's make sure we go out with the bang. Last thing, lemme talk very quickly about the really excited the Meetup program. So the Green Software Foundation has a meetup program, meetup program where we support meetup groups.

If you wanna launch a meetup group around green software, In your region, or actually we've got like 20 regions where we already have members of groups, where we are actually missing organizers and leaders. If you're interested in launching a meetup group or or taking over or co-organizing a meetup group or even speaking at meet group or even being involved in any which way in a meetup group at all, go to meetup.greensoftware.org.

I'm very excited cuz this week actually GSF the London Meetup, which the first one that we're launching now is having an event on Thursday, March 23rd at 6:00 PM GMT. It's at the MasterCard offices in Angel Lane in London. There's more links in the show notes. Chris Adams is going to be there, so he's visiting from Germany.

I'll be Liya Mathew and Sarah Hsu from Goldmans is gonna be there. Daniel Vaughan's gonna be there for MasterCard. And big thanks to MasterCard for helping us host this event. And gen- are offering the venue. So if you're in London and you're listening to this podcast, pop over to the meetup. Thursday at 6:00 PM and if you're interested in launching a meetup, please reach out to us and we'd love to, uh, get your help and we'll to help support you launching a meetup.

So that's it for our news and events roundup. As part of the new format of TWiGS, we have a short closing question that we'd like to ask our guests, and it's gonna be different every single week. So whilst I go and figure out my answers, question's going to be, I'm going to ask Srini, what is a go-to green website that you have booked in your, bookmarked in your browser.

Srini Rakhunathan: So we are part of a sustainability action group within Microsoft and a couple of months back during one of the community calls, there was a website which is founded interesting. On green jobs. Yeah. And I don't think it's a carrier website or a job search site, but I found it interesting that it collated all types of green jobs.

You know, it could be an electrical engineer, it could be as simple as a sustainability policy maker. So I think I have it in my bookmark. I keep looking at it and trying to understand what types of carriers are there in the sustainability space.

Asim Hussain: Wonderful. Great. Send it over our way. We'll put it in the, we'll put it in the show notes. Yeah. Navveen, what go-to Green website? Have you bookmarked in your browser?

Navveen Balani: Interesting question. I would say, I think the simplest answer would be go to google.com. . I think from a, I think from a technology perspective also, and from a sustainability perspective, also, they have very simple interface where you can get whatever information you want, right? So I really love the way they have for the last 10 years.

Made the search more. Yeah, minimalistic. I would say for the two decades, I would say I haven't seen it change much. And maybe through that I'll explore more websites, but. . That is what I think it comes to my mind. That's probably billions of people might be using.

Asim Hussain: Just remembering, like back in the days when like search engines were like appearing, like there were just big messes on the screen, but Google's was just like this empty page. And then this thing in the middle, and it was like a breath of fresh air rather than all these other sites you're going to. So for me, I've gotta be honest with you, like my head is fully in the foundation and kind of the, the, the, I was just checking, I was just literally checking my history, my bookmarks right now and like we are currently like building out a wiki, so like pretty much every other bookmark right now on my website is a wiki page where we're trying to flesh out like every single aspect of, I, I joke that I manage kind of the, the operating system for the foundation and we're like building out what the operating system is and how we work and how to get involved and lots of information there.

So that'll be coming up not right now, but in a future episode be released in the Wiki, but that's, that tends to be what I'm working on. The only other kind of, I think, website that I really love in this space is is Branch Magazine. , which is, uh, Chris Adams who's the other host who of this podcast talks about.

He's built it originally, but it's a wonderful like magazine, which has like lots of articles about green technology and the really cool thing about, it's also carbon aware, so, when it, the electricity's dirty, that doesn't show images and when electricity's clean. So actually it kind of implements what it's, Oh! I have another one as well actually! I just remembered another website, but I'd admit I don't have it bookmarked cuz I just remembered it. But there's a website and I just discovered it the other day. I think it's very cool. It's low lowwwcarbon.com and it's a showcase of low carbon websites, how they've done it, and the case studies, how they implemented it, some examples.

That's a pretty cool website I've got. So yeah, I didn't think I'd have any, but I've had, I've got a couple actually now just so it just goes to show. That's all for this episode of The Week in Green Software. All the resources for this episode and more about the Green, Software Foundation are in the show description below, or you can visit greensoftware.foundation. That's green software, one word foundation in your browser. If you enjoyed the show, please consider leaving a five star review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Your feedback is incredibly valuable and helps us reach a wider audience. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.

Bye-bye.

Navveen Balani: Thank you for listening.

Asim Hussain: Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show. And of course, we want more listeners.

To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation Thanks again and see you in the next episode.