
Show Notes
It’s been three years of Environment Variables! What a landmark year for the Green Software Foundation. From launching behind-the-scenes Backstage episodes, to covering the explosive impact of AI on software emissions, to broadening our audience through beginner-friendly conversations; this retrospective showcases our mission to create a trusted ecosystem for sustainable software. Here’s to many more years of EV! Learn more about our people: Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website Anne Currie: LinkedIn Chris Skipper: LinkedIn Pindy Bhullar: LinkedIn Liya Mathew: LinkedIn Asim Hussain: LinkedIn Holly Cummins: LinkedIn Charles Tripp: LinkedIn Dawn Nafus: LinkedIn Max Schulze: LinkedIn Killian Daly: LinkedIn James Martin: LinkedIn
Find out more about the GSF: The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter
Resources:
Backstage: TOSS Project (02:26) Backstage: Green Software Patterns (04:51) The Week in Green Software: Obscuring AI’s Real Carbon Output (07:41) The Week in Green Software: Sustainable AI Progress (09:51) AI Energy Measurement for Beginners (12:57) The Economics of AI (15:22) How to Tell When Energy Is Green with Killian Daly (17:47) How to Explain Software to Normal People with James Martin (20:29)
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TRANSCRIPT BELOW: Chris Skipper: Welcome to Environment Variables from the Green Software Foundation. The podcast that brings you the latest in sustainable software development has now been running for three years. So that's three years of the latest news in green software, talking about everything from AI energy through to the cloud, and its effect on our environment and how we as a software community can make things better for everybody else. This past year Environment Variables has truly embodied the mission of the Green Software Foundation, and that's to create a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tools, and best practices for creating and building green software. Now this episode's gonna feature some of the more key episodes that we did over the last year. We're gonna be looking at a wide variety of topics and it's going to be hopefully a nice journey back through both the timeline of the podcast, but also the landscape of green software over the last year and how it has dramatically changed, not only due to the dramatic rise in use of AI amongst other things, but also just to the fantastic ideas that people have brought to the table in order to try and solve the problem of trying to decarbonize software. So without further ado, let's dive in to the first topic. Chris Skipper: First, we brought about a new change in the way the podcast was structured. A new type of episode called Backstage. Backstage is basically a behind the scenes look at the Green Software Foundation, internal projects and working groups. It's a space for our community to hear directly from project leaders to share the wins and their lessons learned and reinforce trust and transparency, which is one of the core tenets of the Green Software Foundation Manifesto. Now, there were a bunch of great projects that were featured over the last year. We're gonna look at two specifically. In our first backstage episode, we introduced the TOSS project. TOSS stands for Transforming Organizations for Sustainable Software, and it's led by the fantastic Pindy Bhullar. This project aims to embed sustainability into business strategy and operations through a four pillar framework. . It's a perfect example of how the foundation operationalizes its mission to minimize emissions by supporting organizations on their sustainability journey. Let's hear the snippet from Pendi explaining these four pillars. Pindy Bhullar: Transforming organizations for sustainable software is the acronym
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