Category: Uncategorized
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Why I spend time working on ClimateAction.tech
I’ve been investing a bunch of time into ClimateAction.tech, an online community since around August 2018. I’ve seen it grow from a private slack group of about 100 people into something closer to 1600 people now, and I figured it would be worth writing down why I spend this time. I’ve tried to work out…
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Quick notes from an EU Green Public Procurement Workshop for Cloud and IT in Brussels
As part of my work with the Green Web Foundation, I’ve ended up spending time in Brussels going to workshops, to feed into policy for greening the way we do digital. I’ve just finished the second workshop today which was about the sexy, sexy subject of public procurement. Why am I doing this? Because I…
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How to rate limit punks with nginx
I do some ops work for the Green Web Foundation, and over the last few weeks we’ve been seeing nasty spikes in usage on our API, which have had the effect of overloading the machine on occasion. We resolved it in the end by applying some rate limiting in nginx. Here’s how. The process is…
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In praise of sea otters
Sea otters are awesome. I have a bunch of tabs open, and I wanted to drop some content here before I close them. Sea otters are great in particular if you care about climate change, because they eat sea urchins, which in turn really, really like eating kelp, a giant seaweed that forms huge, beautiful…
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Two things I wish existed, and would want to make if had lawyer super powers
A friend of mine, Ed asked me this in a private Whatsapp group before tagging me on twitter with this message: Two things I wished existed A “Green Oak” Software License Anything to discourage the use of open source software and services to support the extraction of fossil fuels would be good. We’ve seen previously…
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How to forward requests with proxy_pass in nginx
I’ve been doing some work of late with The Green Web Foundation, and recently we moved from using Gearman as a queue, to RabbitMQ instead. RabbitMQ has a management UI that makes it easier to tell what it’s doing, and it also exposes this information at a specific port, (lets say 12345) in the form…
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Fellowship-it: an idea to get over the last hurdle when applying for funding
I keep planning to apply for the Shuttleworth fellowship, and failing to apply, because I’m not happy with my final application, so I want to try a weird trick that might help. It might help you too. My experience I tried earlier this year, at the last minute, I flaked out, because, after spending hours…
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How much of our internet infrastructure will be underwater in 15 years?
I follow Alexandra Dechamps Sonsino on twitter, and I learn a colossal amount from what she share, but some recent links she shared really got me thinking. I’ve written previously about how tech and the internet plays havoc with our climate because it relies on fossil fuels. It looks like the climate is wreaking havoc…
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Notes as I learn about tuning MySQL
I’ve been doing some work with MySQL again with the Green Web Foundation. This has involved working with relatively large sets of data, so to make some queries run faster, I’ve found myself looking at the settings it uses by default, and having to understand what queries are doing under the hood. These are some…
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Creating norms in tech, and the climate crisis
I recently started working to help get a document together to help set some norms in the tech community (such that there is one) about our actions in relation to the climate crisis. So far, it’s been referred to as a climate code of conduct, and there was some push back about using the term…