🔎 What are the main angles to be covered when you truly want to design, run, and sometimes decommission, software, in the greenest possible way?

🎙️ In this episode, Sara Bergman, a seasoned software engineer and one of the acclaimed co-authors of the O’Reilly book “Building Green Software” joins Gaël Duez to discuss the book, and more specifically the chapters on AI, measurements, and hardware.

Some takeaways:

💻 Software people’s responsibility in utilizing hardware

🌡️ Concept of temperature-aware computing

☁️ Importance of major cloud providers

🌱 Some follow-up on the discussion on carbon-aware vs grid-aware computing for more effective environmental impact 

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Gaël Duez 00:00

Hello everyone. Welcome to Green IO, the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world one byte at a time. Every two Tuesdays, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. Because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO. All the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the transcript, will be in the show notes both on your podcast platform and on our website greenio.tech

O’Reilly books remain a world class reference when it comes to sharing IT knowledge. It kind of sets the tones on what matters in the software industry. And to be honest, if you do a quick research on a topic like security, you will easily find ten to twelve books talking about these topics in the last, I would say five years. I did the exercise with machine learning and AI and data, and it's just overwhelming. And then when you do the exercise with sustainability, I have to say that until this year, the only book mentioning clearly sustainability in its title was the one from Tim Freak, which was published way back in 2016.

So it is a fair statement to say that the new O’Reilly book, Building Green Software, written by Anne Curie, Sara Bergman and Sarah Hsu, has been very much awaited in the green software industry, in the green software community. So this is why I'm delighted to have today on the show Sara Bergman with us to talk about the latest trends and what are all the angles to be covered when you truly want to design and to run and to maybe sometimes decommission software in the greenest possible way. Sara, as I said, is one of the co-authors of this book. She is a senior software engineer. She works at Microsoft. She's based in Norway. And I think I have to give her double kudo in this episode, because this year she gave birth twice. First to a wonderful book, much acclimated and much awaited, as I say, but also to a beautiful little boy. So nice to meet you, Sara. Congratulations for bringing yet another beautiful human being on planet Earth. And thanks for joining the show today.

Sara Bergman 02:44

Thank you. Thank you three times. Yes, it's been quite exciting the last twelve months, indeed. I'm really glad to be on the podcast. Thanks for having me.

Gaël Duez 02:55

You're more than welcome. And Sarah, if you listen to us, the other Sarah, you know you don't have to be jealous because you will also join the podcast at some point in September. And you're the one in Green IO London, the conference, the on-site conference that will have a book signing session. So we will have the three Musketeers on the show at some point or the other.

But, Sara, before we jump into the nitty gritty of building green softwares, where you will bring your own expertise, I must say, I admire you so much. Every time I try to write an article, it's great for, I would say the first two thirds, and then I just can't make it. I just cannot close the project, etcetera. It's just a little article. And you wrote a book. You have to tell me, what is your secret recipe to manage to write a book on top of being a very active member of the climate action tech community, a very active member in the Green Software Foundation? A very active member. I guess. I mean, you're still on their payroll at Microsoft. So how did you manage?

Sara Bergman 04:08

Yeah. Also while being pregnant.

Gaël Duez 04:13

I mentioned it, but I didn't want to bring it up yet another time in the discussion.

Sara Bergman 04:18

Yeah. Sometimes I question my life choices. Sometimes I'm very happy with my life choices. No, but I think there are several things. So, first of all, I got the question to co-write this book. It was in the early stages of my pregnancy, and I was like, is this really a good time? There was definitely a lot of mom guilt from my side, you know, should I be doing this sort of selfish project when I should really just be focusing on my, my kid? But then, you know, how many times in your life will you get the question to write a book, especially the book I always wanted to write for O'Reilly, like, I felt this was maybe a once in a lifetime opportunity and I didn't want to regret it. And after all, you know, my son is going to live on after me. He's going to have a whole life on this planet. So I want to do everything I can do to ensure he has a bright future. So, yes, I said yes to write this book, but I wasn't the lone writer. I had Anne and I had Sarah. And when I asked other people, like, who have written books, like, oh, what are your best tips? A lot of them said, don't have any co authors, but I want to say, do they have co authors? Have co authors that you know and trust, Anne and Sarah, I mean, there would have been no book without them. It's been a great collaboration. We work really well together. I'm so pleased to be able to say that. And that's been such a driving function. You know, when you did a little bit of motivation, they had my back and I had their backs, and we could proofread each other's stuff. So that's been, that's been a really big part in sort of getting this book out.

Also, having deadlines when it's like enforced by someone else can be really, I am at least motivated by that. You know, you should have this done by this date and sort of set it up at a reasonable pace. It hasn't been, in fact, we were a little bit faster than what O'Reilly suggested because we were motivated to get the book out the door. So that was helpful.

And thirdly, it's a really fun thing to write about, I think. I enjoy writing. I always had and I miss it in my normal work, so to speak, because then I write code, but I don't write so much text except emails. Write a lot of emails.

Gaël Duez 06:49

Are you going to use the generating AI to do your emails? I'm surprised.

Sara Bergman 06:54

They will take away the creative process of writing. No, I know it's a great feature. I enjoy writing. So I guess that was a long answer to a short question.

Gaël Duez 07:04

Yeah, but that's a very interesting answer, I guess. Enjoying it. You need to find pleasure in entering such a big adventure. And let's talk about green software now. I guess you brought some specialties, some special knowledge compared to your colleague. I remember, for instance, that Anne was very proactive and was very, even a bit provocative regarding how you should code, looking for efficiency, trusting language builders rather than trying to tweak them, et cetera. She had also a pretty strong stance on AI, who would be a no brainer when it'