Cohort Jan/Feb 2024

Learn how the tech industry can reduce carbon emissions and help tackle climate change. If you want to make a difference, join in.

Anne Currie

Building Green Software - Become an Expert

The tech industry needs to reduce its carbon footprint, but how? What should we do and how can we convince others? If you care about these questions then this course is for you. Building green software is a solution to three problems: how to reduce global carbon emissions, how to get tech teams to embrace modern dev and ops best practices, and how to make them more motivated. Becoming sustainable is not about doing less. It's about doing everything better. Green systems are fundamentally aligned with modernization and increased efficiency. Battling climate change is a great motivator for your teams to embrace modern practices that were designed to reduce resource use and increase resilience, but also help you ship faster and find product market fit. The techniques of green software were pioneered at Google to help the company build high scale systems that used fewer resources, were cheaper to run, more resilient and easier to change and adapt. Those green techniques can also be used by every other enterprise. On this course, you will learn what they are and why they work. What is green software?The Green Software Foundation defines green software as software that minimizes its emissions through operational efficiency, code efficiency, and shifting work in time and place to when and where low carbon power is available. In practice, that means green software is designed to run on renewable power. To be future-ready, software must take advantage of the unpredictable characteristics of renewably-generated electricity (i.e. it is cheap and abundant at some times and in some places and scarce and expensive at others). That usually means software that can shift work in time to take advantage of sun and wind and is frugal when it's dark and the wind isn't blowing. Learn the fundamentals of building green software and the impact of the energy transition on tech in an in depth, 6 week online course (1 hour per week) based on Anne's O'Reilly book Building Green Software. The course provides a thorough grounding in the ideas behind building software to survive the energy transition.&nbsp; Ideal for anyone who will be leading or supporting others in making systems ready for the future e.g. sales engineers, team leaders, trainers, product owners, architects or CTOs - i.e. your green champions. WhyIn tech, there are major wins from embracing sustainable systems. The best practice techniques for utilizing renewable energy can deliver far, far cheaper power as well as bettter resilience, productivity, and security. You will learn how to align engineering, operational, and architectural decisions with reduced carbon emissions but also better resilience, performance, security, and development velocity, while lowering your hosting bills. Course ContentLive lessons on:How to assess the likely impact of the energy transition on your software systems and judge the opportunities and risks.How to know where to start with greening your systems.How to know what to do and when. Part 1 - operations.How to know what to do and when. Part 2 - demand shifting and shaping.How to know what to do and when. Part 3 - code and platforms.Learn about the Green Software Foundation (GSF) Green Software Maturity Matrix from its original author &amp; review and reflect.Plus: Q&amp;A sessions. WithThe GSF Green Software Maturity Matrix Self Assessment Framework to help you assess where you are and your next steps (Anne is the GSF Maturity Matrix project lead). Case studies from companies at multiple levels of the maturity matrix.

Future-Ready, Green Software

Senior Architects who need to get up to speed on the principles of green sustainable systems including futureproofing advantages.

Experienced Software Engineers who are worried about the risks of the energy transition to their systems &amp; want to take mitigation steps.

SREs, Operations and DevOps engineers who want to understand the implications for hosting &amp; platform choices of the energy transition

Who is this course for

What you’ll get out of this course

You will understand the key factors that matter to the sustainability of a system and whether it's likely to survive and thrive or crash and burn in the energy transition.

Understand the key factors in sustainability

You'll know where to focus your attention first and why. Running before you can walk is likely to end up giving you a bloody nose.

Understand the pros and cons of operational efficiency vs code efficiency

You will learn where, when, and how to use it and what to do when that demand just won't be shifted.

Understand demand shifting and demand shaping

The next steps for your systems depend on where they are now and your appetite for leading the pack vs sticking to tried and tested, commodity solutions. By the end of the course, you will understand what tools are out there that you can leverage to deliver on your specific goals

Understand where your organization sits with respect to green software maturity

Provide a brief description for each module as a way to sell the value of what students will be learning throughout the course.

First Module

Second Module

Third Module

Course syllabus

Former editor-in-chief of InfoQ magazine, author at TheNewStack, editor and writer

Former CTO, Starling Bank (Britain's first digital bank)

Executive at JustEat, Micro:Bit Foundation, ex London Olympics

Engineer at Microsoft, co-author of "Building Green Software"

What people are saying

Meet your instructor

1 hour, afternoons (lunchtimes US East) for 6 weeks

One hour of live training per week for 6 weeks

Each week there will be an optional research and thinking project for discussion at the next Q&amp;A session

Projects

Course schedule

This course builds on live workshops and discussed and debated projects

Active interactive learning

Small groups

Join a community of like-minded people who want to learn and grow alongside you

Course completed by

About this course

Get notified about the next cohort

Learn from live sessions