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#61 Scaling Green Software with Anita Schüttler

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What does it take to go beyond raising awareness in green software? To avoid checking just boxes? What is required to scale green software practices in a company?

To discuss these issues, Gaël Duez welcomes Anita Schüttler on this episode “from the trenches”. Anita is a seasoned software engineer and expert on digital sustainability. She works as Head of Sustainability at IT company neuland. Besides, she is a co-chair of the German Bundesverband Green Software, an auditor for the Blue Angel for software and a Champion of the Green Software Foundation.

Together, they covered many topics including:

The Formation of the Bundesverband Green Software
The CO2 Challenge Project
Scaling Green Software Initiatives & measuring its success
The Challenges in Certification Processes
The Emotional Roller Coaster of Nonprofit Initiatives

And much more!

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Anita’s sources and other references mentioned in this episode:

Transcript (auto-generated)

Anita Schüttler 00:07

In IT, you unplug your servers or you do a deployment and the emissions are gone. And this is so great. I think we actually do have a common ground to be ambitious.

Gael Duez 00:26

Hello everyone, welcome to Green.io. I'm Gael 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. What does it take to go beyond raising awareness in green software. To avoid just checking boxes such as inviting a speaker, organizing a digital collage workshop or training some volunteers in eco design. What is required to scale green software practices in a company? To answer these questions, I'm delighted to welcome Anita Schuttler on the show. Anita is a seasoned software engineer and expert on digital sustainability. She works as of Sustainability at IT company Newland. Besides, she is a co-chair of the German Bundeswehrband Green Software, an auditor for the Blue Angel for Software and a champion of the Green Software Foundation. Wow! But what convinced me is Fiona Leinbundgut, our MC at GreenHire Munich this year, introducing Anita to me as a die-hard Green Software engineer. And after exchanging with Anita, I had to add die-hard Green Software Engineer scaling Green IT from the trenches because she shared several real life examples which were truly inspiring and which she will share with you now. Hi Anita, thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.

Anita Schüttler 02:18

Hey Gail, it's so great to be here, thank you.

Gael Duez 02:19

You're welcome, you're welcome. You know, when Fiona introduced us. She mentioned that you were hands-on green IT practitioners. I think she said something like hardcore green software practitioner or something like that. So I was like, oh, great. We're going to talk with a lot of use cases from someone being actually in the trenches. And you know how I love this sort of episodes with feedbacks from people doing things, facing challenges and sharing what works, what doesn't work, et cetera. But then we had a discussion preparing the visit and you mentioned the Bundesverband Green Software. Yes, I managed to pronounce it properly. And I was like, oh my God, I wasn't aware how active this association was and actually launching a pretty big project. So I've got a few questions for you. And if you don't mind, I would love to start with this topic. And maybe my first question would be, how did you join this association?

Anita Schüttler 03:23

Yeah. So it's called Bundesverband and it sounds really German. I know you can just call it Green Software Association. Basically, what did the Green Software Foundation does worldwide? We aim to do on a German level. So the Bundesverband is pretty young still actually, it was founded last year. the story goes like this, there were some companies who were already working together on this green software topic and they wanted to accelerate what they were doing, they wanted to bring it out to the people and this whole thing didn't get much traction and at some point they said, maybe we have to think this like two steps bigger. Why not create a Bundesverband? this thing, it's, it's, yeah, it's an association. So it sounds like something from the German government or so, but it's not, it's companies coming together and doing this. And we have this for several fields, like AI is one of them as well, or can have any other. And I was already talking to those who were thinking about founding such an association. We were somewhat being friends with each other or becoming friends. And when they said, let's found this association, I said, we want to be part of this. We want to be one of those companies that join as the first ones. So with my company, neuland and… I asked everyone internally and people were actually pretty excited about this. To sum it up, we're actually a founding member of the Bundesverband Green Software.

Gael Duez 05:35

Congratulations. Can individuals join this association or is it only company membership?

Anita Schüttler 05:38

It's meant as a company membership, but we do have members who are single person companies. So NGO also is fine as well. Or if they're in academics, they can join.

Gael Duez 6:00

Okay. You were already doing a lot of green IT stuff. What was the motivation for you more personally to join them?

Anita Schüttler 6:02

Yeah, I was actually really excited about this because it felt like, okay, now we got a movement and now we have something that we can show to everyone and where we can, uh, put up some big signs and tell people about what green software is. And it looks more official, so to say. Yeah. And it looks like a bigger thing. And we really noticed this when, as soon as we had this association, there was a different kind of speed behind this and more of a push behind this. yeah, that really accelerated a lot of things and moved it to another level than it was before.

Gael Duez 06:42

And that might be my thank you, Captain Obvious moment. But why did you have this need to create a German association? Why not, for instance, creating a chapter of the Green Software Foundation? What drives you to go more in-depth at the local level?

Anita Schüttler 07:09

Yeah, so Germany is actually pretty active also in terms of the Green Software Foundation. For example, we have the most Green Software champions of any country within the Green Software Foundation champions. We also have several meetups. I always join the one at Karlsruhe every month because it's online and everyone can join bit of an advertisement to join this Green Software Meetup. And still it felt like the Green Software Foundation was too far away. I think it's very focused on the English speaking countries or English speaking community. it's a pity because there's so much going on in Germany and there's so many people who are interested in this and really doing things. So we wanted to gather those and get in more companies and people to join us and do something without maybe even without having this barrier of the language. Because when you tell people to say this in English or to communicate in English, many are put off then if they are not this familiar with English as well.

Gael Duez 08:30

I was sort of expecting the answer, but I didn't want to lead the witness and of course the language barrier and the connection to the local ecosystem is super important. And that is also true that we need to think in ecosystem and it's perfectly fine to have large global association, well connected with more local ones, with more specialized ones. You have some being launched about AI, for instance, or e-waste and that's perfectly fine. Thinking in ecosystem is very important, but I just wanted to make sure. And so far, so the, Bundeswehrband Green Software is one year old and you've got a pretty big project as far as I know. Can you tell us a bit more about it? You've already advertised it at Green Eye of Munich, but then you've got a second chance.

Anita Schüttler 09:30

So I have to start earlier actually, because this project that we're currently trying to launch has a history already. So as you might know, I'm part of, well, I'm a co-chair at the Bundesverband Green Software. And my other co-chair is Aydin Mir Mohammadi. And Aydin is really a pioneer of the first hour and he's all in very internally motivated. And he launched a project in Karlsruhe. So Karlsruhe, if you have no idea, and I had no idea before either is a city that has about 50 % IT companies. So there's a really strong digital ecosystem there. And what Irene did together with others in Karlsruhe is that he went to the local cyber forum it's called there. And together with them, he started a project called CO2 Challenge. So the idea of the CO2 Challenge is that companies commit to reducing 40 % of their digital emissions within one year. And to make this happen, they get a free mentor or mentorship by a person who will guide them on their first steps. What do we have here? What can we take a look at? And basically, what are the low-hanging fruits where we can just, yeah. Turn stuff off or so. This is what we want together with this. And this project has been running in cars for about a year already and it was really successful. it's, you know, there was no, we measure everything beforehand or whatever. It was really low entry points. We just count servers or so. So like this, you can't see this right now, but yeah. Rule of thumb. And now the idea is to take this project and scale it to a European level. And what we want to do is we want to have coordinators for at least three European countries. So obviously Germany will be in there, all of Germany this time, not just Karlsruhe. We already have the Dutch who are very excited about this and want to join. And currently we're still actually struggling to find a third country. I'm very much hoping for France because they have such a strong ecosystem already. And who knows, maybe we'll find a fourth one even. And then we want to have regional levels, so regional clusters. And those will actually be working with the companies to really make it happen on the local level. And there will need some proper measuring and counting and not just rule of thumb this time. Yeah. Okay. So there are quite a lot of things to unpack here.

Gael Duez 12:49

And just for clarification, the goal is to reduce the IT related emissions by 40 % or four zero within a year compared to the SBTI target for the ICT sector, which is 45 % until end of 2030. So that's pretty ambitious. How did you manage to convince people to go for such an ambitious target? And why this number?

Anita Schüttler 13:17

I didn't tell me this a few days ago. We were talking about, shouldn't it be 50 % just to make it even bigger? And when I first heard this, it was like, oh my God, so much 40%. That sounds like really a lot. And, um, I didn't said, yeah, I wanted to make it sound like a lot, but not that much. So it's less than half. And I thought this sounds good. So this is where the 40 % comes from. And the idea is that in IT we have so much waste and everything is so wasteful. And if we just manage to turn off this waste, if it's 40 % in the end, no one knows. Maybe we actually do manage to reduce 40%. And if you see how much, like for example, environments are running, even though they are not used, 40 % actually isn't that much of a big number anymore. but yeah, we want some ambition because that's what I always think is a good thing about IT, reducing emissions in IT, unless unlike in physical environments where it really takes a lot of effort to even get a few percent in IT, you unplug your servers or you do a deployment and the emissions are gone. And this is, this is so great. So I think we actually do have a common ground to be ambitious on.

Gael Duez 15:05

It makes sense to have aspirational goal. But in that case, I feel a bit of a contradiction between we need to measure that we want to assess that people are shooting for big goals and the rule of thumb, because we all know that there are a lot of low hanging fruits, especially in companies where there is no green IT ambassador or sometimes even sustainable the ambassador. But how do you manage to say it was pretty successful? What were your success criteria? Was it more like the number of companies or people joining or was it the actual results that you managed to get so far?

Anita Schüttler 15:31

Yeah, so maybe I mean, Aydin will be mad at me for telling this, but we don't have hard numbers, but we have soft numbers from Karlsruhe where they. Yeah, back of the envelope calculations. If we turn this off and it takes this much and it runs for this long and we have the grid makes, example, how much will this be? yeah, we're sometimes a little, yeah, well, uncertain. Is this gonna work out really well? Because if you only take a look at this first step, having a few companies to start with and lowering some of what they do, it might actually not be that much overall at the end compared to like when you compete with say a factory that does cement or whatever, we have no chance at all to make this happen. I think what our advantage is that with such a program there will be a lot of training and we plant a seed here for the next years to come and more and more people will really learn how to be a practitioner because that's what it takes to become a mentor at all. And then you have those people in the companies, they will accelerate what's going on there and they will spread this whole thing to the next company and so on.

Gael Duez 17:09

I understand now it's a learning by doing process and that whenever the calculations are less and less back of the envelope and more more rooted in best practices, then of course you will be backed by harder numbers. But to be honest, the back of the envelope calculation that you already shared, mean, if you divide by two your number of servers and you know the energy consumption of the electricity consumption story of your server and somehow where they are located and the carbon emission factor of the electricity grid in the region, it's a bit less than back of the envelope. Starts to be quite serious. So thanks for the clarification. And actually when we were chit chatting before hitting the record button, you mentioned that this project, the CO2 challenge that you want to bring at the European level was, and I'm quoting you here, an emotional roller coaster. I think it's actually pretty cool if you can share what you meant by this, because when we consume non-profit projects or initiatives, we don't necessarily see the amount of energy, sometimes money, but also cognitive loads that are needed to kickstart them and even more important to ramp them and to nurture them. So could you explain a bit more what you mean by this and what do you expect to achieve also obviously with bringing it at the European level?

Anita Schüttler 18:49

Yeah, first of all, we are a pretty young association. We have pretty low member fees to make it possible for everyone to access this association unlike when you join a bigger association and money is very scarce. So we're going for an EU funding and we need a very high level of funding. So there's programs on the EU level where you get like 60 % of your funding and there's a lot of money, but when you have to provide those other 40 % yourself, you certainly might have a big problem if you don't have money flowing in from all sides, which we don't have. And currently there's still a program called Life, and this is the one that we're going for. The problem is this program was built with the intention of accelerating the energy transition or rebuilding ecosystems. So lots of physical things and now we come with our IT stuff and we actually don't really fit into this program. But we still want to get funding from this. So when you look for which program could be the right one for us, we always feel like we are sitting between two chairs because we don't really fit into this one, but we also don't really fit into that one. And we have to make sure that we serve the criteria for this program to get funding at all, but still be true to what we want to achieve with this. So this is the first problem. We get some help from someone who does this on a regular basis, EU fundings. And she's always very excited about what we want to try to achieve because it's something new and it will bring attention to this whole topic to the Brussels level, to the EU level because they don't really think of this decarbonizing IT thing at all right now. You can see this because there's no program for this, to fund this. Instead of like for AI. Just pick your program right now. So she's very excited and we are near the hand are always very, Oh God, this is never going to happen because it doesn't fit and they won't fund us. And then we'll sit there and have no money at all. Maybe by the time this podcast comes out, we'll have made it successfully. I hope so. My present self will then be happy for my future self. So we'll see.

Gael Duez 21:47

I find it really interesting what you've just shared for two reasons. There is this question of scaling and even for a nonprofit, like what you describe is basically investing for fundraising. And that's not really something that you think that often when you launch an association. But when you want to have a larger impact, here comes a question of scaling and resources and just the time that people will put on the table is not necessarily enough. that's a twist of a mindset to say, okay, we're going to pay people to get more money, et cetera. And some people might feel uncomfortable with this. Like, isn't it getting too commercial or whatever? But on the other end, as you mentioned, if you really want to go beyond a few initiatives in Germany and go at the European level, then it makes sense to get resources. So yeah, thanks a lot for sharing. This feedback and this bit under the hood approach. Yeah. And the second point that struck me, but it's a bit like, you know, I'm rambling on this is my, what I call the green IT curse all the time, which is like IT is flagged as green by nature. And as you mentioned, AI is everywhere, et cetera. we don't have any.

Anita Schüttler 23:00

Electricity is a hundred percent renewable and we're done.

Gael Duez 23:20

And we're done. Bravo. And the issue is, of course, that if I were the European Commission and I was checking which sector to decarbonize first, I mean, I could consider road transport as much as the IT sector, because basically we emit as many greenhouses, and this other sector. But people will spontaneously think, oh, all these trucks, big polluting trucks, etc. We need to electrify them. And no one will think about data centers or devices and so on. So it's really interesting that even to get funding to do decarbonization of IT, you don't fit anywhere. Yeah.

Anita Schüttler 23:55

We're accelerating so much and this IT sector will be a biggie in the future and no one's thinking of this right now. \

Gael Duez 24:00

I agree. I agree. The trend is really worrying. speaking of it and maybe it's time to move to which is second part of our interview, as I mentioned in the introduction. And what really interested me in the discussion we're having and we had to prepare the episode is this question of scaling. I mean, you're someone who tries to bring things at scale. And obviously you described it super well with how from a small car's way based association you're trying to bring it to the European level. But it's also something that you did a lot in your work and you've got some good use cases to share about taking a good idea and making it at such a level that it starts to have a meaningful impact. I would love to get your feedbacks, get your insights from the trenches.

Anita Schüttler 25:00

So my company is we build software for e-commerce. Yeah. And this in itself is I actually want to call it a problem here because we've lost some activist people over the years because they wanted to work on something that will provide the world with a better out view instead of consumerism and more of this. But I love to stay because it means that I get to work on where it's maybe needed most at least on what I can choose, where I can choose to work. So I've actually started out as a programmer in my company 15 years ago now. And like five years ago or so, something happened. There were the demos from Fridays for Future in Germany. They were really big back then. We as a company were joining with a big group of people on a demo that was like 80,000 people or so, maybe 50,000, I don't know, a lot in any case. And there was so much momentum at that time, 2019, before the pandemic, that we said we want to do something in our work environment as well. we founded a guild internally at Newfoundland and we looked at our operations, what can we do better there? And back then, we already found that actually our biggest factor might be the software that we build and we have no means to find out how much that causes. Some three years ago, I finally had my company where it needed to be for me to switch from being a programmer to being a full-time sustainability practitioner. I had a lot to learn back then, but this is where it started. And later that year, I found out about green coding and found that this is actually where it all can come together for me. So what I bring as a programmer and what I'm interested in as, yeah, a person, a mom, yeah, a citizen of this planet. And from there it all got going. in the beginning, it was like, I wanted my company to help me push this topic. And they always said, Anita, you have to make it successful, then we'll back you up. And if no one's interested in this, then there will be no backup in the first place. So this is a bit, huh, what? But this is just how it happened. actually, I got there. It just took me three years. So what we did in the beginning is that I worked with our teams. We have one or multiple teams for each customer and we sneaked it all in. Yeah. We looked at what are you doing there? And then like a one and a half years ago, I suddenly had the first of our customers and it's a big corporation. One that is on the stock market and they have over 300 IT people working for them all over Europe, actually. And they actually started out their green IT journey just with a small workshop. And they asked me, I was so happy, I can't tell you how happy I was. They asked me to get there and have a workshop with them, talk about what is green software at all and what are the principles that you look into and so on. And then nothing happened again for a year. early this year, they came back and they said, we have a big sustainability strategy for our whole corporation and green IT is part of this. And we want to do role specific trainings for all of our over 300 IT practitioners. And I was like, yes, yes, this is such an important step. Those last few weeks and months, I haven't had much free time to be honest, because I was doing so many things in parallel. And we had two trainings of two hours each, just basic knowledge about sustainability, about negative impact of IT and so on. And then we had training for product management, product owners, project managers, UX and UI, like a real deep dive until no one was able to do anything anymore after four hours or so. And just recently we had another deep dive for web developers, backend developers, architects, operations, and so on.

Gael Duez 30:15

And this deep dive, when you mentioned web developer, backend developer, architects, they were all in the same room, this is one single course or you split the deep dive into all their specialties?

Anita Schüttler 30:31

Yeah, so what's important to know is that the teams that are working on their piece of software, they're always cross-functional teams. So you have everyone that is needed to make this piece of software happen in the same team. And at first I thought, I would be cooler to have them all split up and each of them gets their own training. But then I realized that it's actually pretty good if like, for example, the front end developers know about operations and architecture as well. like the product owners know about UX and so on. So they really can work together then. So this wasn't just me telling them stuff. I had a lot of practical exercises in this as well. So where they get to discuss and work with a tool to really find out about this, yeah, sustainability in IT thing. We took a look at a lot of measurement tools and I had some exercises where they had to use them themselves and find out how they work and how they can, for example, use EcoGrader and the web sustainability guidelines together to find out what to do and so on.

Gael Duez 31:55

So it means that you had doing this exercise, both a product manager, a UX, a web developer, etc.

Anita Schüttler 32:00

Yeah, get them to work together.

Gael Duez 32:09

What struck me also is the time span. You're almost talking in years, not in weeks or months. It's, you know, I planted the seed and eventually one year later they came back to me and say, oh, we want to launch a full program, et cetera. So it's, it's really a, a work of patience, I would say.

Anita Schüttler 32:30

Absolutely. You need really, you need a long breath to get this done. Both me and my company, I'm really now seeing a lot of traction and a lot of support, but it took years to build and I think it's the same with customers. have a first meeting of some sort, they get to know you, then nothing happens for months. At some point they will come back. Then you plant the next seed and then you wait for months or maybe even a year again until the next step happens. And in some ways this is good because the, for example, the measuring ecosystem has evolved a lot in that last year. Now I actually were able to show them, look, this is the green metrics tool. We've used it. This is what it looks like. This is how you do it. So I wouldn't have been able to do this a year ago. And the reason I was able to show them all of this is because we did it ourselves in our company. And that's a big thing for us as well.

Gael Duez 33:37

That's a big point. And that's definitely a topic that I would love to investigate with you. Just one quick question. You mentioned green metrics tool. Are there a specific set of tools that you use in your company? Where does it come from?

Anita Schüttler 34:00

The green metrics tool is a tool that was built by green coding solutions in Berlin. Diddy, shout out. Yeah, they did a lot of really great tools. And by the way, the Bundesverband green software now has a landscape. Just like the CNCF, for example, they have a landscape as well. And we have a working group that worked at this landscape of measuring tools. can find it on landscape.bundesverbandgreensoftware.de. Yeah. And it's a tool that you can use to measure how much your software uses in which phase of the software life cycle. So looking in from the outside.

Gael Duez 34:42

Well, thanks a lot for the clarification. now getting back to what you mentioned is that you practice it in your own company. Can you provide us an example on how you deploy green IT measuring tools and how you make sure that a piece of software or full software is actually getting assessed and how you reduce its environmental footprint?

Anita Schüttler 35:06

Yeah. So this is, have to talk about two different things here. The first thing is that we always work for a customer and we work together with the customer. we usually also have people from the customer working with us together in the same team and all of the software that we build belongs to the customer. So this means that either the customers in the journey, they're on board or we… have very limited ability to do something. There's been some sneaky stuff going on where we had a team that did this together with the product owner from the customer and they labeled their project cost reduction. So in Jira it said cost reduction and then we had our green IT tasks and every sprint we had one task that the team did over time. It reduced some money as well, of course, but it was actually meant from a different perspective. If the customer is not actively asking for this, we have to be sneaky about it.

Gael Duez 36:20

Was the fact that you planted the seeds and went almost undercover using the word cost reduction where actually you were looking for carbon reduction, was it useful? to get broader adoption? Yeah, okay.

Anita Schüttler 36:40

Yes. And actually, the stuff that we did in this project, it was so cool. And I talked about it at conferences as well. Because for example, this team, when we talked beforehand, they were very certain that this service, uses 80 % of our, causes 80 % of our cost. This will be the service where we have to start. And then we started measuring and found out that no, not at all. This service has like 7 % or so of your emissions, but this other service that costs you, I don't know, five or 6%, it causes over 50 % of this team's emissions. This was really an eye-opener for me to find out. And then we tweaked their servers. We played around with the setup of service that they had and how many instances where and so on and were able to get the emissions of this setup down to like four or 5%. So basically reducing almost half of the emissions that this team caused in their operations. Yesterday we had our internal conference again and in last year's conference I talked about this and everyone's really interested in, how does this work? What do we have to do to get it done? Yeah, so you always learn from whatever you do. And then you talk about it and others will start being interested and asking the right questions. That's really cool.

Gael Duez 38:15

That's cool. And it creates inspiration. And you were mentioning that you needed to mention two things. The first one is that you work always with a customer, otherwise you don't have that much impact. And I get the second thing about the feedback you wanted to provide about using the tools internally was...

Anita Schüttler 38:33

So this year, we actually now have a software that belongs to Neuland. So we have full impact of this. It's a search software called Homes. It builds on open source software like Solar, OpenSearch, and so on. But now we were able to do whatever we wanted with this. And we used this ability to do whatever we wanted to say, we want to have a Blue Angel certification for the software and be one of the first companies at all to get a Blue Angel for their software. So the Blue Angel is an environmental certification that you can get for all kinds of stuff. And it's published by the German Environmental Agency together with the Ministry for Yeah, environmental ministry or so. And you can get this for like, it's known for paper, for example, toilet paper, whatever. I've seen it on a ship as well, which was very weird. You can get it for data centers. And a few years ago, there was also a version for software that only had one company getting certified. And that was the Ocula by KDE. And that was it because the requirements were so high that it was not practical at all. And then it was reworked a few years ago, like two years ago or so. Now we have two software that have this Blue Angel after what was reworked. The first is the Green Metrics tool, which it already talked about. And the second is Nextcloud, which is really nice as well. But all these software that were certified so far, they were open source. And now we came with our almost but not completely open source tool and we started late April. when we did, asked Arne, who's our measuring partner, we measure everything on his cluster, and Philippe, who's in the Bundesverband together with me active and he's like I am an auditor, he's audited all the other softwares that got the Blue Angels so far. And I asked them, we want to be done by the end of May. This should be no problem at all. it? And they were kind of, let's see. And I was pretty naive in the beginning. And then it took us like until the end of May and even still, we're still not done. I can say that the green metrics tool evolved a bit as well in this process and we all learned a lot and it's just important for someone. Someone has to do this.

Gael Duez 41:47

How come that it took so much time?

Anita Schüttler 41:39

Yeah. So, first of all, the software wasn't done yet. It still isn't. I'm someone who always goes, I always go to my colleagues. We have to be fast. Come on, let's do this. And the software was still changing while we were already measuring. And the team was working on the software and I did this certification process together with a colleague of mine, Tilo, and we had no idea about how the software is working. So we had to learn how is it working under the hood. And the thing about the Blue Angel is that you can see it was written with a different kind of software in mind. It was written with, we have this installer, you click on it, it installs everything, and then we have to make sure that it's good and it doesn't do anything crazy. And now we come, so Nyland is not a product company. Yeah, we're a company building software all the time, but we don't usually build products. And Holmes is not a product as well an accelerator. we had to, we have like five Docker containers that we had to orchestrate one after the other. They need to wait for each other. We need product data that has to be imported and only when it's, when this product data is there, we can go on and so on. So this process was pretty difficult already. And then we did the measurements and found out that, so the Blue Angel asks you to have a standard deviation of not more than 5 % over like 10 or 30 measuring runs. And we had like seven, eight, 9 % standard deviation. So what is happening there? And yeah, until we tackled this, so we found out we need more memory for solar and so on. So until you're done here. And then we thought we were done, but we had to redo all of our measuring because we had to split up our scenarios. So you need usage scenarios. We have one for a back office where someone is configuring something. And then we have a usage scenario that imitates the real online shop that will search something. And this scenario of Yeah, it's basically J-Meter doing this. No one had this before. We had to split up those because they were together and so on. So lots of problems where all of us learned, not just us at Neuland, but also Anne and Philipp, they were learning and yeah, the tool evolved over time. And I think we've taken quite a few hurdles in the process and I hope that by next week we will actually really be done with this.

Gael Duez 45:00

Okay, excellent. And if someone were to ask you, how do I scale green software practices in my own company? What will be the top advices, top tips that you would tell him or her?

Anita Schüttler 45:10

Top tip number one. Be as close to what the people in your company are actually doing as you can. Don't come with green software principles on a high level because they will not have an impact in the daily work. look at what people are doing, translate for them, and then ask them to do this or that, which you know will really have an impact. Second is depending on what company you're in, it might actually be a good thing not to talk about sustainability. know this sounds really crazy, but I've had so many conversations where people said, oh, this is cool. We already thought about doing this. Oh, we are actually already doing this, but not for sustainability reasons, but for reasons X, Y, Z. So Green Software provides so much value on so many levels that people often don't even realize that you're doing something for the environment here because it also adds so much value for other things that a company is after.

Gael Duez 46:25

I can feel that. I was about to add, yeah, be prepared to be patient. That's a long game. Thanks a lot, Anita. That was a lot that was shared for a single podcast episode. So I wish you the very best with your… CO2 challenge and the ramping up, I would say, of the Bundesvenband Green Software. Yeah, thank you. And also that all the efforts that you've put into your company and your clients will actually keep on spreading. So thanks a lot for joining the show. Thanks a lot for having me. was great to be here.

Gael Duez 47:00

Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode 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, are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and of course on the website greenio.tech. If you enjoyed this interview, please take 30 seconds to give us five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Each vote is worth a thousand likes on YouTube. Talking about social media, sharing this episode on your favorite one, or directly with relatives working as a software practitioner seems also a good idea to provide them with inspiration to go beyond raising awareness and scale green software engineering. You got the point. Being an independent media, we rely mostly on you to get more listeners.

We are now going to do a summer break or winter break, actually, for me. And Green IO will be back on Tuesday, August 19th. Who will be the guest? I don't know yet. I have a couple of interviews to edit and I'm not sure which one will come first. Make sure to subscribe to email alerts or notifications on your favorite podcast platform not to miss it.

By the way, Green IO is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog and check the conferences we organize across the globe. As you guessed from this episode, Green IO Munich had a great first edition last week and of course, all eyes are now on Green IO Llondon on September 23rd and 24th. As a Green IO listener, you know the drill, you can get a free ticket to any Green IO conferences using the voucher GREENIOVIP. Just make sure to have one before the 30 free tickets per conference are all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you fellow responsible technologists build a greener digital world.

Roxanne 49:08 one byte at a time

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68 episodes

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

#61 Scaling Green Software with Anita Schüttler

Green IO

published 2M ago

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What does it take to go beyond raising awareness in green software? To avoid checking just boxes? What is required to scale green software practices in a company?

Together, they covered many topics including:

The Formation of the Bundesverband Green Software
The CO2 Challenge Project
Scaling Green Software Initiatives & measuring its success
The Challenges in Certification Processes
The Emotional Roller Coaster of Nonprofit Initiatives

And much more!

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Learn more about our guest and connect

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Anita’s sources and other references mentioned in this episode:

Transcript (auto-generated)

Anita Schüttler 00:07

In IT, you unplug your servers or you do a deployment and the emissions are gone. And this is so great. I think we actually do have a common ground to be ambitious.

Gael Duez 00:26

Anita Schüttler 02:18

Hey Gail, it's so great to be here, thank you.

Gael Duez 02:19

Anita Schüttler 03:23

Gael Duez 05:35

Congratulations. Can individuals join this association or is it only company membership?

Anita Schüttler 05:38

It's meant as a company membership, but we do have members who are single person companies. So NGO also is fine as well. Or if they're in academics, they can join.

Gael Duez 6:00

Okay. You were already doing a lot of green IT stuff. What was the motivation for you more personally to join them?

Anita Schüttler 6:02

Gael Duez 06:42

Anita Schüttler 07:09

Gael Duez 08:30

Anita Schüttler 09:30

Gael Duez 12:49

Anita Schüttler 13:17

Gael Duez 15:05

Anita Schüttler 15:31

Gael Duez 17:09

Anita Schüttler 18:49

Gael Duez 21:47

Anita Schüttler 23:00

Electricity is a hundred percent renewable and we're done.

Gael Duez 23:20

Anita Schüttler 23:55

We're accelerating so much and this IT sector will be a biggie in the future and no one's thinking of this right now. \

Gael Duez 24:00

Anita Schüttler 25:00

Gael Duez 30:15

And this deep dive, when you mentioned web developer, backend developer, architects, they were all in the same room, this is one single course or you split the deep dive into all their specialties?

Anita Schüttler 30:31

Gael Duez 31:55

So it means that you had doing this exercise, both a product manager, a UX, a web developer, etc.

Anita Schüttler 32:00

Yeah, get them to work together.

Gael Duez 32:09

Anita Schüttler 32:30

Gael Duez 33:37

Anita Schüttler 34:00

Gael Duez 34:42

Anita Schüttler 35:06

Gael Duez 36:20

Anita Schüttler 36:40

Gael Duez 38:15

Anita Schüttler 38:33

Gael Duez 41:47

How come that it took so much time?

Anita Schüttler 41:39

Gael Duez 45:00

Okay, excellent. And if someone were to ask you, how do I scale green software practices in my own company? What will be the top advices, top tips that you would tell him or her?

Anita Schüttler 45:10

Gael Duez 46:25

Gael Duez 47:00

Roxanne 49:08 one byte at a time

68 episodes

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

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