Green Software for Practitioners (LFC131)
Catching up posting about something that happened on on Friday: I completed the free Green Software for Practitioners course by the Linux Foundation.
It’s roughly 2 hours of material to get through, so I did it over the course of a couple of lunchtimes. There is a test at the end, with an 85% pass mark, but it’s all contained in the material and you can refer to your notes (it’s not a certification, so it’s not a proctored exam). There was one question I got wrong that I felt was 99% due to the wording, but overall it was a straightforward experience.
As for the subject and material itself? It’s an interesting subject - one I’ve been meaning to write about more, in fact[1] - and the course covered the basics and ideas behind Green Software quite well. It’s not a technical course at all, but I don’t think it needed to be at this level.
What is covered is mostly terminology you’ll come across if you start diving into “green” topics; what people mean when they talk about “Net Zero”, “Carbon Neutral”, etc, and how those things are usually measured. The bulk of the course discusses the principles of Green Software[2] -
- Carbon Efficiency
- Energy Efficiency
- Carbon Awareness
- Hardware Efficiency
- Measurement
- Climate Commitments
Back when I was still on Threads I was tentatively starting to read up on this topic, as it was coming up with more frequency at work, and posted a question along the lines of:
“are you doing anything to improve the sustainability of your software, and if so, how are you measuring things?”
Mostly I was just curious if there were any tools people were using to get baselines and measure improvements, but equally I was interested in what people thought about the topic in general. The few responses I got back were universally negative and mostly in the ballpark of “that’s not something we can control” (it is), or “that’s a hardware problem, not software” (it isn’t). I get the impression the Green Software for Practitioners course is as much about raising awareness of what everyone involved in building and running software can do, with a side helping of standardising and normalising the language around this topic. Both of these are very good things, and in particular, more awareness is sorely needed.
Would I recommend this course? Yes, if you have a couple of spare hours. I think it’s worth it for an improved understanding of the terminology, at least, and it’s a decent overall introduction to the topic. In my place of work “Green Software Engineering” is already starting to gain some importance. It might not be immediately relevant to you now, but I can see this becoming a bigger industry issue in general over the next couple of years.
If nothing else, you’ll get a badge out of it!
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I actually thought I had already published at least one, if not more, blog posts about this… but it turns out they’re still in drafts. Oops. ↩︎
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This link takes you to the same training material as the course that you can read at your leisure. You only have to go to the Linux Foundation site if you want to do the final exam. ↩︎