Fractional CTO | Sustainability, Climate & Impact
Digging into the details of NSW’s new data centre guidelines that were announced today. These are for a ‘go faster’ process as opposed to minimum standards of the sort being discussed at a national level.
To meet the guidelines, data centres will need to contract enough new renewable generation to match its annual electricity consumption from it’s fourth year of operation, … Read more “NSW’s new data centre guidelines”
A bumper year so far for data centre commitments = a bumper year for fossil gas, from the same hyperscalers supposedly committed to rapid decarbonisation.
Amazon at their upcoming AGM are rejecting calls for disclosure of the impacts of AI growth on their climate targets – having been models of obfuscation and opaqueness on the reality of their footprint for … Read more “A bumper year for data centres = a bumper year for fossil gas”
Leaked documents have exposed how Chevron and ExxonMobil, have executed a calculated campaign to massively dilute or scrap the EU’s flagship Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD).
The strategy targeted all levels of EU governance (Parliament, Council, and Commission) to remove crucial provisions like climate obligations, civil liability, and supply chain scope.
It was executed through an innocuous sounding alliance, the “Competitiveness Roundtable” consisting … Read more “Chevron and ExxonMobil re-writing EU legislation”
If you’re using pnpm as a package manager and dependabot for security alerts – be aware, if you’re running pnpm v9, dependabot will no longer flag required updates for components with vulnerabilities, as it doesn’t support the v9 lock file.
It’s a known issue internally at GitHub, but it caught us out after we upgraded from v8 to v9 – … Read more “Using pnpm & dependabot? Security alerts silently cease when you upgrade to v9”
Have you ever forked a GitHub repo? A quirk – that some argue is a significant security flaw – popped back into software engineering consciousness today*. A few things to watch out for:1. If you fork someone else’s repository, make some commits without pushing upstream, and delete the fork – those commits will still be accessible via the original repository.2. … Read more “GitHub forking vulnerability”
Amazon has been marking their own homework and giving themselves 10/10 in their latest sustainability report. The reality is vastly different:
You may seen the recent announcement from Microsoft that Xbox is now the first ‘carbon aware’ games console – reducing carbon footprint by optimizing updates and downloads to run at a time when the console can use the most renewable energy.
Given the increasingly power-hungry needs of the worlds data centres, there is huge opportunity to shift workloads in this … Read more “Building carbon-aware software”
Any organisation more than a few years old typically ends up with a pretty diverse set of technology in use, changing over many years. Team members come and go with different skills, motivations and interests. Technologies shift in popularity, industry trends, and therefore in availability of skills, and ongoing support.
Keeping this in check requires active effort across engineering teams … Read more “Communicating the evolution of your technology stack – and keeping it in check!”
The landscape of climate-friendly investments has shifted hugely since I wrote my first blog on the subject 2 years ago.
2021 was a record year for ESG, with an estimated $120 billion poured into sustainable investments, more than double the $51 billion of 2020. Some of this could be self-fulfilling, with Blackrock switching up it’s model portfolios to … Read more “Climate positive & ESG finance – where are we at?”
In a recent project I encountered a need for an AWS Lambda function to receive messages from a Kinesis stream, and forward them on to an IoT pipeline in another ‘target’ AWS account.
The basic steps are:
The basic steps are:Create a role in the ‘target’ AWS account, with the permissions to … Read more “Cross-account lambdas and renewing security tokens”
Last year I was privileged to take part in the Global Code program in Ghana. Global Code aims to bring practical, professional software engineering skills to students in Ghana, though a three week summer school.Their goal is to build the technology ecosystem within Ghana, hiring the best students, training them further, and bringing them back as tutors in the following … Read more “Teaching at Global Code in Ghana”
Passive ETFs and tracker funds have become common way to achieve a low-cost diversified portfolio across global indices. The proportion to which the biggest greenhouse gas emitters feature in these indices, and correspondingly in my own passive investments bothered me, so I wanted to see what options I had to tackle it.
If you’re just interested in the climate friendly … Read more “Climate friendly investing when you’re using passive ETFs and tracker funds”