Architecting Carbon Conscious Software, with Charles Humble

Climate Stack

In this episode we speak with Charles Humble, climate polymath and author, about why we as software engineers should think about energy consumption of our workloads. We also talk about how nascent legislation and standards are turning externalities into real costs, forcing innovation that gives us more control over software energy usage. Charles has encyclopedic knowledge of the history of the industry and is a former CTO himself, so his judgments are practical, realistic, and applicable.

It’s easy to become cynical when you learn that our industry uses about 300TWh per year, about the consumption of Brazil. What I admired about Charles is that despite his knowledge, he was optimistic. He used a comparison to acid rain, to bring home “We can fix this problem,” and goes on to tell us how we can do the same for tech industry as well.

Listen to learn that there may actually be useful things you can do, now and in the future, to shape your system’s energy usage and energy policy of the large hyperscalers.

Our Guest, Charles Humble

Charles Humble is a freelance consultant, author and podcaster. A former software engineer, architect, and CTO he has worked as a senior leader and executive of both technology and content groups. He was InfoQ’s editor-in-chief from 2014-2020, and was chief editor for Container Solutions from 2020-2023.

He writes regularly for The New Stack and other publications, is a highly experienced content strategist, and has spoken at multiple international conferences including Devoxx, GOTO, WTF is SRE and QCon. His primary areas of interest are how we build software better, including sustainability and ethics, cloud computing, remote working, diversity and inclusion, and inspiring the next generation of developers.

Charles is also a keyboard player, and half of the ambient techno band Twofish.

You can find him on linkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/charleshumble/

Links to Charles' Mentions

• The BBC 4 program, “Costing The Earth” https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006r4wn
• WATTime, information and APIs for optimizing energy usage: https://watttime.org/
• Green Software Foundation: We are building a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tooling and best practices for green software: https://greensoftware.foundation/. They make an API that is a wrapper around WATTime and other carbon intensity data for real-time optimization: https://sci-guide.greensoftware.foundation/I/APIBased/
• Holly Cummins, senior principal software engineer at Quarkus for Red Hat: https://www.linkedin.com/in/holly-k-cummins/
• Amazon is making sustainability datasets more readily available: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/aws-announces-simpler-access-sustainability-data-launches-hackathon-accelerate-innovation-sustainability/

• Books
  • “Building Green Software” by by Anne Currie, Sarah Hsu, Sara Bergman: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/building-green-software/9781098150617/
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Your Hosts

Mansi Shah - Joshua Marker

ClimateStack