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#49 How to actually do Green Software in my company? with Annie Freeman

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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 😉).

❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!

📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here.

📣 Green IO next Conference is in Paris on December 3rd, 4th and 5th (use the voucher GREENIOVIP to get a free ticket)

Learn more about our guest and connect:

📧 You can also send us an email at [email protected] to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.

Annie's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:

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, grassroots movement started earlier this year, 2024.

Gaël Duez (06:02)

Okay. usually when I discuss with people sponsoring or being ambassador of grassroots movements, they tend to tell me it's okay at the beginning. We get a lot of excitement. People are really willing to join, willing to participate. We start doing a bit of things, but quite often it reaches the plateau and not that much happened. And it seemed that that was not the case for you because you've been able to deliver something and to deploy it. So how did you manage this moment where you've got this excitement, you've got these people willing to work together, starting to regroup? up to the point where you were actually delivering something.

Annie Freeman (06:48)

Yeah, I definitely didn't do it by myself. When I started that first hackathon team, one of the people who joined me as another engineer at Xero called Adria Snow, who's been absolutely incredible taking on building out the carbon footprint calculator. And I think Adria's persistence and just impressive dedication to it has been so key to us being able to continue saying, hey, we've got this new exciting tool, here's a new feature, we've added this new visualization, you can now see this breakdown. So there's been lots of exciting updates in that respect. And also I connected with the sustainability team at Xero pretty early on and They loved it. They were like, yes, we want to support this. This is fantastic. And really helped push things forward as well, especially kind of more from like a upper management level as well, considering Adri and I are engineers. being able to get that from both perspectives as well has been really helpful.

Gaël Duez (07:55)

So it was basically a team of two plus good connections with the sustainability team that managed to get approval from top management. Is it correct?

Annie Freeman (08:05)

Pretty much, we've had a few other people help out, but those have been the key players.

Gaël Duez (08:10)

And my question is, how many employees do we have at Xero?

Annie Freeman (08:14)

Yeah, I believe it's over 4,000, between 4 5,000 I think.

Gaël Duez (08:20)

Okay, so that's a pretty small ratio. And when you started to build this carbon calculator, how was your top management or even your management, your middle management supporting you? Did you have some time? Did you have some resources? Did you have a green light, but hey, you still need to do your job? How did all this happen?

Annie Freeman (08:41)

Yeah, definitely. mean, Xero's been really great. We have week-long hackathons every six months, so they're a perfect opportunity to put all your normal work to the side and work on something new. In that first hackathon in April of this year, I got a free trial of a tool called Climatic, which is a carbon footprint

Annie Freeman (09:05)

calculation API and they do all sorts of different carbon calculations, including cloud computing. So with a free trial of that, we were able to put together a proof of concept product and get a little bit of data around some of Xero's key products and say, hey, we've made these calculations. We can share this data with you. And from there, with that data, with that proof of concept, we were then able to go to the sustainability team and say, can we get funding for Climatic for this tool? Can we keep promoting this at zero? And yeah, I think as we'll probably come back to the data is always so key in getting things moving, I think. So that was that was how we were able to get started.

Gaël Duez (09:55)

And did you have some extra time to work on this topic? Or was it side project, as I see very often, or did you have a share of your bandwidth allocated to it?

Annie Freeman (10:10)

No, it was fully a side project for both Adria and I. Adria doing the development on the carbon footprint tool and I've been doing leading all the community practice and outreach and things like that. So yeah, all a side project.

Gaël Duez (10:24)

And that's an interesting point because it seems that your initiative kind of forked if I understand you right here, because on one side you have the two of you spear heading the development of an internal tool based on climatic data. but on the other end, you also have launched a community of practice could you tell us a bit more about the outcomes of this community of practice and how it interacted or maybe not at all with your calculator project?

Annie Freeman (10:54)

Yeah, definitely. Well, I think… we're trying to change the culture, the engineering culture at Xero. And I continuously am reminded and something you probably are as well, you we're so involved in this green IT space and it's, there's still so many people that just have no idea of the impact that software has in terms of carbon footprint. And so, I knew that it was going to be so important to really push that education, that like getting people excited. And while the having the data is a really key part of that, there needs to be so much more around it to get people excited. we have a few different community of practices at Xero. So it's a standard way of getting people involved. yeah, started up a group. started with an initial learning session basically introducing people to what is green software, what is the impact, what have we done so far and ran a few sessions around the world as well. we've got offices in the UK, US and Singapore and things. So really tried to push it out there as much as possible. And then since then we've had a few sessions talking about the role that data centers have to play in the whole sustainability and software space. We've had brainstorming sessions to figure out what people are interested in. Something we're organizing at the moment is what best practices are there for running Kubernetes workloads to use that most efficiently and things like that. So that's been the crux of that. And then I've shared a lot of like, hey, here's an interesting article. I'd love to know what you guys think. Or here's a really easy way to start using the data that we're collecting. And then on top of that, just sharing documentation around how to use our carbon footprint tool and really try to engage with people as much as possible.

Gaël Duez (12:40)

and how many people are we talking about?

Annie Freeman (12:59)

So far, believe about 80 people have joined the community of practice.

Gaël Duez (13:04)

80 people. You mentioned that… you trained a lot, you raised awareness, then you trained, that you shared information, but you also mentioned that you achieved a few things, Could you give us one or two examples of achievements that you get via this community of practice?

Annie Freeman (13:23)

Yes, definitely. And these probably seem kind of small, but I think to me they were quite exciting. So one thing we did was some user testing with some other engineers and I've just showed them the tool and I was like, you know, let's use this. How can you improve it? What would you like to see? And I think that sort of started to get people thinking a bit more because they've like properly sat with it and thought about it themselves and like critically analyzed it. And so was really cool. The other day I had an engineer come over to me and he's like, Annie, I have a feature request for footprint. I have a theory that our team is doing something weird with our test environment, something weird is going on and I really want to prove it. Can you add this feature?

And I thought that was just so cool that people are really getting excited and thinking a bit deeper and really trying to figure out what's going on and how they can improve things, which is so cool. And the other thing, which was really small, a team mate of mine was writing up sort of like a pros and cons list about whether we should deprecate an old service and whether we should put the resources into doing that. And she'd mentioned that we would save X amount of dollars if we remove all these resources and things. And so I added a comment to the report saying, and we would also save X amount of carbon emissions each month. And then the next day, one of the architects was commenting on the report and referenced that comment about the carbon emissions in his opinion of what we should be doing as well. And it was the smallest thing and no one probably thought much of it. But to me, I think that was very indicative of that sort of slow culture change starting to happen slowly, that it's becoming kind of more normal in our working lives.

Gaël Duez (15:20)

Yeah, yet another boring data to handle carbon. But that's a good news.

Annie Freeman (15:24)

Yes, exactly, yeah, just add that into the mix, it's fine.

Gaël Duez (15:30)

Excellent. Annie could you tell us a bit more about the tool? I've got a dozen questions about it, but can you briefly explain the scope, the technological stack that you've chosen to use?

Annie Freeman (15:45)

So as I said before, huge shout out to Adria for her amazing, amazing work on this. But so we call this tool Footprint and it's based in Go. So the decision for that was that Go is in itself a really lightweight language. So try to be as efficient as possible for the tool to tell you how efficient you are. So we use, we collect all our AWS billing data. So Xero's resources are mostly hosted on AWS. We have access to all our billing data from the Phenops team and we can collect that workout. For example, we used X number of EC2 instances for X number of hours in this particular region. And we can collect that data and send it off to Climatic, the carbon calculator API. And that'll come back to us with the emissions data, the emissions factors, and we can return that to people. if you are an engineer at Xero, you can go to Footprint, the internal tool, type in your team name and you will get a list of all the components that your team owns. How much carbon each product has been emitting for the past month. You can see a breakdown of each AWS resource within that component. So a pie chart of, was it 30 % lambdas, 20%, S3 bucket, whatever it is which is quite helpful in diagnosing what might be going on. And then just to help visualize it all a bit more, we've also got the equivalent amount in a couple of different statistics. So for example, the equivalent amount of kilometers you would have to drive in a regular gas car to produce the same amount of emissions.

Gaël Duez (17:41)

And just to understand right here, when you mentioned the word product, is it product in an AWS meaning? So as you mentioned, EC2, S3 bucket, et cetera, et cetera. Or is it also products in a Xero way, which means that maybe this service or the sub-service that you offer to some of your customers are also track, which means that ultimately you would be able to answer a customer asking, what is my carbon footprint using your product? Or you've got product A, product C, product F, you've used it for six months, 12 months, 12 months. This is the carbon footprint that you've emitted by using our product. So is it one of the two or both?

Annie Freeman (18:32)

Well, that letter would be very cool. We're definitely not there yet. So yeah, when I mean product, I basically mean microservices that a team owns. And so that microservice might be made up of a couple of lambdas, some instances, or it runs its workloads on Kubernetes and also connects to a queue or something like that.

Gaël Duez (18:52)

how often is the data updated and how easily it is for an engineer to leverage it to fine tune his or her code or choices when it comes to the infrastructure, for instance.

Annie Freeman (19:06)

Yeah, sure. So at the moment, we update it monthly. And so you'll be able to see your emissions for the previous month. And then an engineer can click into each component and see the breakdown.

Gaël Duez (19:18)

I understand. yet, having a refreshing rate on a monthly basis helped you already get some significant results. mean, you can share some success stories or is it just for awareness or was it already actionable for many teams?

Annie Freeman (19:33)

Yeah, definitely. I think the best example we've had so far, Adria, who's been building this out, was looking at one of her team's components. And this was while Footprint was in development, and it was being developed kind of each AWS service at the time. So when we first released it, it only did S3 buckets, EC2 instances, and lambdas. And so Adria was looking at this component that her team owned and was thinking, okay, this component produces a small amount of emissions, but we haven't got everything in the calculation yet because it was still being developed. And so Adria worked through all the different services and when CodeBuild was added in, CodeBuild was being used as one of the resources in this tool. Suddenly the emissions of this product jumped up a huge amount and it ended up being that CodeBuild was responsible for about 80 % of that component's emissions, which was really surprising to the team. And so they were able to, the team were able to use that data and say to their team lead, know, like, we've recognized this, can we get the engineering time to change this to a more efficient way of building and deploying? And so now that component is on Kubernetes and they were able to drop their omissions for that product down quite a lot.

Gaël Duez (21:00)

Can you share some numbers to illustrate or is it confidential?

Annie Freeman (21:05)

the moment we're keeping these numbers internal to Xero. Of course it's data where it's for engineers, so it's not audited and can't be publicly released. So I can't share that with you unfortunately, but yeah.

Gaël Duez (21:22)

That's all good.

It's perfectly understandable. Can you still share in terms of order of magnitude, what is the share of the tech stack and all the IT department, I would say, in regards to the overall greenhouse gas emissions at Xero? Is it something like negligible or is it a few dozen percent?

Annie Freeman (21:44)

Yeah, so I think like many technology companies, it is a really small amount, believe around 1 % or less than 1%. I don't have the exact number. And I know you referenced this in your The Green IT Curse article recently. Yeah, so it's a great article. And so I think zero is very similar in that respect.

Gaël Duez (21:58)

You read it! Okay, got it. Just wanted to know if Xero was an exception or not.

Now, before moving on on how you deploy the tool and so on, Earlier in our discussion, you mentioned data as being absolutely pivotal, which leads me to a few questions regarding the choices you've made. My first one would be, why did you choose Climatic? And the second being, because they might be bit intertwined. Why didn't you go for another open source solution like Boavista, or Cloud Carbon Footprints from ThoughtWorks? What makes you willing to develop this interface tool, collecting data, analyzing it with the emission factors from Climatic, and then pushing it back to the end users being software engineers?

Annie Freeman (23:05)

Yeah. So kind of a funny story, full circle moment. I was listening to this podcast, to Green IO, a while back. And you had Therese Gale on as one of your guests. And I absolutely loved the episode. I thought it was really inspiring what she had been doing at Salesforce, MuleSoft. And I realized that she was based in New Zealand. So I reached out to her and we ended up meeting up and she gave me so much fantastic advice about how to sort of start a grassroots initiative at Xero. And one of her pieces of advice was use Climatic. So I kind of just went with that. I was like, sweet, that sounds good to me. So we went with that and it worked really well for us. We've had fantastic support from the Climatic team as well. So it's worked really well. I believe Climatic does use Cloud Carbon footprint for its calculations as well. So it is, as you say, kind of intertwined.

Gaël Duez (24:03)

I got it. I didn't know that the Green IO podcast, who's hosted by a guy living in a super small island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, is connecting people all around the world, including within their own country. That's quite fun. But thanks for sharing. But Thérèse was in London at Green IO London and she gave an amazing talk as well on

Annie Freeman (24:17)

You're pretty amazing. Yes, absolutely.

Gaël Duez (24:28)

the job she managed to do at Salesforce. yeah, I really enjoyed my discussion with her. She's a very pragmatic yet stubborn enough person to make things moving forward. that's great. That being said, thanks a lot for sharing this anecdote. And what is interesting here is that you still decided to build things on your own. was the main driver not to use something off the shelf?

Annie Freeman (24:54)

Yeah, I think probably like many companies, Xero is quite large and there's a lot of interconnected complex systems and things that are just unique to each company. And for such a sort of niche thing that we really just were starting off, we wanted to do one job and it was easiest to be able to just use the data that we had and make it work exactly for the setup that we have at Xero. And so far that's been working and maybe in the future we'll expand to something else.

Gaël Duez (25:33)

That's great. And that's also very interesting because you didn't make that choice on a user interface perspective. You clearly made that choice for data management issues and being able to collect the data, clean the data, store the data and leverage the data, analyze the data in a very consistent way. that's interesting because from time to time I hear, but that's a question of a user experience, actually the user experience here is really around data management. I correct?

Annie Freeman (26:04)

Yeah, I think we touched on this before. It comes back down to the data and having the quality data that people are like, yes, this makes sense. I'm going to take action because of this data. And so we did really want to prioritize making sure we were able to do that correctly.

Gaël Duez (26:22)

Okay, so. Annie, you managed to deliver with Adria a tool, fully functional tool reporting carbon based on the internal use of zero, you managed to get data from Climatic and AWS. It was mostly a work based on data management. So you've got something, you've got a great output. How did you manage to achieve your outcomes? maybe this is the moment where it's more the human side of the story. How did people accepted the tool and embraced the tool and leverage the tools? Basically, how did you roll it out?

Annie Freeman (27:02)

Yeah, I think that's such a great question, because that is so important that the human side of things on top of the data. And one thing I think many of us are probably aware of, especially in in large companies, there's so many competing priorities, there's always so much work, and adding in another thing for people to do to review to improve upon. It's it can be really hard. So I've been taking the approach of first of all, and I will say we're very much in the middle of this, this is not widespread yet at zero. I'm doing this at the moment. But taking the approach of how can we visualize the data, make more people see it, make it just become a normal part of your ways of working. And so I've been sharing ideas with the community of practice, what are like the most low effort things that you can start with. So it doesn't feel like an extra thing that you have to add to to your to-do list. So for example, one thing is just simply sharing screenshots of the data, the carbon emissions data during a sprint review with stakeholders or an operational health update. And I've done this a couple of times with my team now. And 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 or that's actually really weird because that component is supposed to be archived. So why is that producing any emissions? And so 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. So a few other things that I've been sharing and getting people to do is potentially discussing how you're going to review carbon emissions metrics during retrospective meetings or adding a regular task to your sprint planning to just review the metrics. And so it's those easy things like that that will help embed and footprint tracking and taking action into the normal ways of working.

Gaël Duez (29:22)

If I follow you there, think your magical recipe is blend data visualizations, so make things explicit, plus… adjust to existing process. Just do not build something new. It's just you've got a retrospective. Let's just have five minutes to talk about this data, but no extra organizational burden on top of the teams. Am I right?

Annie Freeman (29:33)

Yes. Yes, just slot it in, make it as easy as possible. And then suddenly it's just a normal part of your day.

Gaël Duez (29:51)

yeah, the boring sustainability stuff to do. And how would you measure the success of the deployment today?

Annie Freeman (29:59)

Yeah, great question. think, you know, as I said, we're still very much in the middle of it. But it's more those those smaller things of people taking notice and coming up with their own ideas that I think are showing that that culture is starting to take root and changes are happening. We always whenever we share an update or a new feature, we always see the usage go way up and everyone gets really excited and things. But of course it's an ongoing challenge to just keep pushing it and keep making it a part of people's work lives.

Gaël Duez (30:34)

Excellent. I love the idea of checking the usage just after an update. That's interesting. Like, what's new? What's new? Let's check or something. Annie, you already shared a lot, and I thank you a lot for this. Is there any specific resources that you would like to advise people willing to kickstart things as you did or ramp up things if there is already a good momentum in their own company?

Annie Freeman (31:01)

Ooh, yes. What can I share? Obviously, the Green Software Foundation has so many amazing resources. And we've used Climatics, which I would recommend, but also Cloud Carbon Footprint is really great. I've written up some of the things that I've talked about today on my website as well. So I can share that article with sort of those low effort actions and things and some ways you can start taking action. I feel like most of the things that I use have probably already been talked about. Your newsletter, this podcast, the environment variables podcast. There's just so many fantastic people in the space who are really, really knowledgeable and they've got really great ideas.

Gaël Duez (31:41)

Thanks a lot. And hi to Chris, Asim, and Anne, who very often are the host of the environment podcast, Viable. I really enjoy this show as well. As usual, we will put all the references that you mentioned during the episode and that you've just mentioned right now in the show notes, because it's all about sharing information and getting people into action mode, would say. And for this, having these kind of resources is very useful. My last question, and you're familiar with the show, so you already know it, is would you share a piece of positive news about sustainability and maybe even digital sustainability with the audience?

Annie Freeman (32:05)

Yes, absolutely. Yeah, well, I feel like this might be really niche, but this definitely caught my eye the other day learning about the fact that Microsoft is now building its first data center partially made out of wood. So trying to reduce emissions from steel and concrete, which are really high meters. And I thought that was really cool. There's definitely so many things like that that we just don't even think that we could innovate on. And I that was really interesting.

Gaël Duez (32:48)

That's pretty crazy because I didn't know about it. So I'm going to really enjoy reading the link to the source. Plus, that's cool that you mentioned something positive about Microsoft because the two last episodes, they were a bit under pressure. you know, it's a subtle world and things are a bit complex and it's not all white or all dark. So it's good to know that they're still innovating when it comes to sustainability despite some challenges they've got elsewhere. So excellent. Thanks a lot, Annie. And thanks for joining the show. It was really great to have you there. Who knows, maybe if we decide to launch a Green IO Melbourne, so moving a bit down under, we will have the pleasure to meet and to have you on stage as well, obviously.

Annie Freeman (33:20)

You're very welcome. Yes. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for having me. It's been such a pleasure and I would love if you came down under. It would be awesome to meet you down there and everyone else who is interested in green software.

Gaël Duez (33:51)

Let's try to make this happen and let's try to find also the participants that will commit to reduce drastically their carbon to offset the fact that I will have to jump on the plane emitting a lot of CO2. So that's always something I'm very, very concerned about. Like, do we have a community which has a big enough size to accelerate things and to make an impact? Because when you invest, I would say, in carbon, you definitely want a

Annie Freeman (34:03)

Yes.

Gaël Duez (34:17)

return on investment and impact. So obviously the impact word is more important for me than the investment one. But anyway, we'll see.

Annie Freeman (34:21)

Mmm, nice. Yes.

Gaël Duez (34:28)

Maybe Green Eye or Melbourne, at least for the moment, a lot of people in the Southern Hemisphere and in Oceania, they will benefit from this episode and your great advices. So thanks a lot, Annie, and talk to you later.

Annie Freeman (34:40)

very welcome. Talk to you later.

Gaël Duez (34:43)

Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. If you enjoyed it, please take 30 seconds to give us five stars on Apple Podcast or Spotify. I know it's not easy to find the feature on these apps, but it gives your vote a much bigger weight and I trust you to succeed. Sharing this episode on social media or directly with relatives working as software practitioners seems also a good idea to provide them with inspiration. You got the point. Being an independent media, we rely mostly on you to get more responsible technologists on board. In our next episode, which will be the 50th episode, yes, five zero, we will welcome Tristan Nito, a respected French veteran in open source and digital sustainability to go to a funeral. Yes, according to Tristan, Moore's law is dead and we should welcome the e-room law instead to boost sustainability in the tech industry. One last word. We already mentioned the Greenio conferences during this episode. The last one of this year will be in Paris on December 3rd, 4th and 5th. As usual, you can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP Just make sure to have one before the remaining 15 free tickets are all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you, fellow responsible technologists, build a greener digital world.

Roxane

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67 episodes

#Tech #Gaël Duez #Sustainability #Digital #Carbon Footprint #Climate Change #Low Carbon #Science #Non-Profit #Geology #Business #Green

#49 How to actually do Green Software in my company? with Annie Freeman

Green IO

published 9M ago

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Have you ever heard “The complaint of the lonely sustainability champion”? Its IT sector version?

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:

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Annie's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:

Transcript (automatically generated)

Annie Freeman (00:00)

Gaël Duez (00:40)

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.

Annie Freeman (03:34)

Gaël Duez (05:29)

Annie Freeman (05:58)

Yes, grassroots movement started earlier this year, 2024.

Gaël Duez (06:02)

Annie Freeman (06:48)

Gaël Duez (07:55)

So it was basically a team of two plus good connections with the sustainability team that managed to get approval from top management. Is it correct?

Annie Freeman (08:05)

Pretty much, we've had a few other people help out, but those have been the key players.

Gaël Duez (08:10)

And my question is, how many employees do we have at Xero?

Annie Freeman (08:14)

Yeah, I believe it's over 4,000, between 4 5,000 I think.

Gaël Duez (08:20)

Annie Freeman (08:41)

Annie Freeman (09:05)

Gaël Duez (09:55)

And did you have some extra time to work on this topic? Or was it side project, as I see very often, or did you have a share of your bandwidth allocated to it?

Annie Freeman (10:10)

Gaël Duez (10:24)

Annie Freeman (10:54)

Gaël Duez (12:40)

and how many people are we talking about?

Annie Freeman (12:59)

So far, believe about 80 people have joined the community of practice.

Gaël Duez (13:04)

Annie Freeman (13:23)

Gaël Duez (15:20)

Yeah, yet another boring data to handle carbon. But that's a good news.

Annie Freeman (15:24)

Yes, exactly, yeah, just add that into the mix, it's fine.

Gaël Duez (15:30)

Excellent. Annie could you tell us a bit more about the tool? I've got a dozen questions about it, but can you briefly explain the scope, the technological stack that you've chosen to use?

Annie Freeman (15:45)

Gaël Duez (17:41)

Annie Freeman (18:32)

Gaël Duez (18:52)

how often is the data updated and how easily it is for an engineer to leverage it to fine tune his or her code or choices when it comes to the infrastructure, for instance.

Annie Freeman (19:06)

Yeah, sure. So at the moment, we update it monthly. And so you'll be able to see your emissions for the previous month. And then an engineer can click into each component and see the breakdown.

Gaël Duez (19:18)

Annie Freeman (19:33)

Gaël Duez (21:00)

Can you share some numbers to illustrate or is it confidential?

Annie Freeman (21:05)

Gaël Duez (21:22)

That's all good.

Annie Freeman (21:44)

Gaël Duez (21:58)

You read it! Okay, got it. Just wanted to know if Xero was an exception or not.

Annie Freeman (23:05)

Gaël Duez (24:03)

Annie Freeman (24:17)

You're pretty amazing. Yes, absolutely.

Gaël Duez (24:28)

Annie Freeman (24:54)

Gaël Duez (25:33)

Annie Freeman (26:04)

Gaël Duez (26:22)

Annie Freeman (27:02)

Gaël Duez (29:22)

Annie Freeman (29:33)

Yes. Yes, just slot it in, make it as easy as possible. And then suddenly it's just a normal part of your day.

Gaël Duez (29:51)

yeah, the boring sustainability stuff to do. And how would you measure the success of the deployment today?

Annie Freeman (29:59)

Gaël Duez (30:34)

Annie Freeman (31:01)

Gaël Duez (31:41)

Annie Freeman (32:05)

Gaël Duez (32:48)

Annie Freeman (33:20)

Gaël Duez (33:51)

Annie Freeman (34:03)

Yes.

Gaël Duez (34:17)

return on investment and impact. So obviously the impact word is more important for me than the investment one. But anyway, we'll see.

Annie Freeman (34:21)

Mmm, nice. Yes.

Gaël Duez (34:28)

Annie Freeman (34:40)

very welcome. Talk to you later.

Gaël Duez (34:43)

Roxane

One byte at a time

67 episodes

#Tech #Gaël Duez #Sustainability #Digital #Carbon Footprint #Climate Change #Low Carbon #Science #Non-Profit #Geology #Business #Green

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#49 How to actually do Green Software in my company? with Annie Freeman

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#49 How to actually do Green Software in my company? with Annie Freeman