29 Aug 2026
Green Software Practitioner certification
Just earned the Green Software Practitioner certification from the Green Software Foundation.
I got a sharper way to think about software and carbon. Three things stuck:
- There are only three levers. Energy efficiency, hardware efficiency, and carbon awareness — doing more compute when the grid is cleaner. Everything else is a tactic under one of them. Buying offsets isn't on the list.
- Carbon intensity is a rate, not a total. The Software Carbon Intensity spec measures grams of CO₂e per unit of work — per user, per request, per page view. Your total can rise while your intensity falls, and that's still real progress. It changes the whole conversation.
- Embodied carbon is often the bigger half. For a phone or laptop, most of the footprint is manufacturing — before it's switched on once. Software that keeps old hardware useful is climate work: quiet, but measurable.
This maps straight onto my consulting work. On an eCommerce store I support, we cut per-page carbon by 30–70% and hosting cost by 26% along the way. I'd been calling that a performance win. It's really an SCI improvement — and now I have the vocabulary to measure and defend it.
Next: putting a real CO₂ figure on every page of that store, with a plan to bring it down.
Note, October 2026: the 30–70% and 26% figures above came from early estimates I can't fully source today. The figure I can stand behind is an estimated 45% cut in CO₂ per visit (0.496 → 0.273 g), and I'm re-measuring the whole site.
Originally posted on LinkedIn ↗