#49 How to actually do Green Software in my company? with Annie Freeman
Update: 2024-11-26
Description
Have you ever heard “The complaint of the lonely sustainability champion”? Its IT sector version?
Here it is “I listen to the Green IO podcast and others as well, I read newsletters and articles from CAT, GWF, Boavizta, Greenit.fr, GSF, etc. But I’m isolated as a green software champion. I have the feeling that I cannot achieve much by myself. How could we actually do green software in my company?”
This episode is all about sharing one concrete use case of someone, Annie Freeman, who achieved to build and deploy an internal tool monitoring carbon emissions in a SaaS company, Xero, with more than 4M users of its accounting software across a dozen countries.
This achievement, among others, has won her to be named a finalist in the New Zealand Sustainable Business Network Awards in 2024
And she started it all by herself when she raised her voice in 2022 at a Xero’s internal technology conference despite having joined the company as a software engineer just a few months ago.
In this episode, Annie Freeman shares great insights with host Gaël Duez on:
💪 How two motivated engineers can start a movement in a 4K employees company,
🔎 Tracking the cultural change signals,
🔄 Bringing carbon awareness in existing process rather than creating new ones,
🎓🛠️ Making Community of Practices & tooling working hands in hands,
📊 How Data management primes over UI when deciding to build a carbon dashboard,
🎙️ Why listening to Green IO actually helps (not Gaël saying 😉).
🔎 Tracking the cultural change signals,
🔄 Bringing carbon awareness in existing process rather than creating new ones,
🎓🛠️ Making Community of Practices & tooling working hands in hands,
📊 How Data management primes over UI when deciding to build a carbon dashboard,
🎙️ Why listening to Green IO actually helps (not Gaël saying 😉).
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Learn more about our guest and connect:
📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.tech to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.
Annie's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:
- Annie’s article on how to create a green software culture at your company
- Climatiq
- Microsoft building first data centre primarily made out of wood
- Sustainable Business Network Award finalists (link goes to technology finalists)
- Annie's talk at the Grace Hopper Conference
- Green Software Foundation
- Environment variables podcast
- Digital Collage
- Green Web Foundation
- Boavizta
- GreenIT.fr
- ClimateAction.Tech
- Cloud Carbon Footprint
Transcript (automatically generated)
Annie Freeman (00:00 )
one thing is just simply sharing screenshots of the data, the carbon emissions data during a sprint review with stakeholders the first time I shared the data, I noted out some interesting things and everyone was like, yeah, okay, cool. And then the second time I did the same thing, I just put out the data and just left it there and everyone was kind of silent for a minute. But then people are like, well actually that's really interesting that that component has got the highest emissions. Surely there's something we can do there to bring that down just leaving it there without any pressure to do anything with it, I think really sparks that problem solving nature and that curiosity with people.
Gaël Duez (00:40 )
Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO. I'm Gaël Duez and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world one bite at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, will be in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and of course on our website greenio.tech.
Here is the feedback I hear quite often. Gaël, I listen to your podcast and others. I read newsletters and articles from Climate Action Tech, GreenWeb Foundation, BoaVista, GreenIT.fr, Green Software Foundation, etc. etc. But I'm isolated as a green software champion. I have the feeling that I cannot achieve much by myself. How could we actually do green software in my company?
Well, this episode is all about sharing one concrete use case of someone, Annie Freeman, who achieved to build and deploy an internal tool monitoring carbon emissions in a software as a service company, Xero, with more than 4 million users of its accounting software across a dozen countries. This achievement, among others, has won her to be named a finalist in the New Zealand Sustainable Business Network Awards in 2024. And she started it all by herself when she raised her voice in 2022 at Xero's internal technology conference, despite having joined the company as a software engineer just a few months ago.
Gaël Duez (02:38 )
Welcome, Annie. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.
Annie Freeman (02:42 )
Hi Gail, thanks so much for having me. I'm so excited that we're finally chatting.
Gaël Duez (02:47 )
Finally, with a bit of time difference because as I should have mentioned, Annie is based in New Zealand.
And maybe you could start with the beginning. How did this initiative at Xero started and how did you build this tool and manage to leverage that much when it comes to mostly carbon footprint reduction?
Annie Freeman (03:34 )
Yeah, of course. So it's kind of been a few years in the making. A few years ago, Xero started this internal technology conference and they were getting speakers from around the business. And I was a little young graduate engineer at the time and I thought, this would be a great way to stand out and prove myself. But I didn't, I had nothing to talk about. And it was the night before the submissions were due and I came across this one really random article about sustainability in software. And this was 2021 and it was only a few months after the Green Software Foundation had been founded. So there was really not many resources, not much discourse on this topic at all at the time, but it felt really aligned with me and I was like, this feels like it could be something really interesting. And so I submitted that. and it got accepted unexpectedly. And it was just a 10 minute talk, but it ended up having some of the most engagement of the whole conference, which was so exciting. But as I said, I was literally in my first year of work and I really needed to learn how to be an engineer. So not too much happened after that, but I continued to share this talk at different events and meetups and things until last year I spoke at the Grace Hopper conference, which is the largest women in tech event in the world. And I think I got a lot of confidence from that. And I was like, right, I'm ready. We're going to make change at zero. We're going to start something. So that brings us to this year where
In April, I led a hackathon team to start building out a carbon footprint calculator for our internal resources. And then that led to starting up what we call a community of practice. So building up the group of people who are interested and want to come along and learn and start making changes. And we've started to build things up from there.
Gaël Duez (05:29 )
So just to unpack a bit what you've said, what is interesting is A, you dared B, it took a bit of time. It wasn't straightforward. Like you had a very positive reactions at first, but nothing that much happened, as you say, because you had to learn the job, but also maybe because things needed to get their way into people's mind. And eventually, it was a grassroot movement that resumed last year. Am I correct here?
Annie Freeman (05:58 )
Yes, grassr
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