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Software Engineering Tech for Good

Building carbon-aware software

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”

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Software Engineering

Communicating the evolution of your technology stack – and keeping it in check!

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!”

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Tech for Good

Climate positive & ESG finance – where are we at?

The landscape of climate-friendly investments has shifted hugely since I wrote my first blog on the subject 2 years ago. 

Capital inflows

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?”

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Software Engineering

Cross-account lambdas and renewing security tokens

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:

1. Create a role to perform the actions

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”

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Tech for Good

Teaching at Global Code in Ghana

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”

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Tech for Good

Climate friendly investing when you’re using passive ETFs and tracker funds

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”

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Tech for Good

Supporting the (digital) climate strike

Next Friday (September 20th), millions of people will join young climate strikers in a Global Climate Strike on the streets and demand an end to the age of fossil fuels.

Tumblr, Atlassian, Kickstarter, WordPress, BoingBoing, Imgur, BitTorrent, are among the many companies to support the Global Climate Strike, along with over 1,000 websites joining the Digital Climate Strike, in response to the … Read more “Supporting the (digital) climate strike”

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Tech for Good

Tech for refugees: Volunteering at a refugee camp (part 1)

When I started my journey into #techforgood, my plan was primarily to break out of London bubble of financial tech and learn as much as I could.

I had stumbled across the folks at Indigo Volunteers who connect volunteers with organisations fee-free, and were working with many refugee related projects. I already had a plan to meet my sister on … Read more “Tech for refugees: Volunteering at a refugee camp (part 1)”

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Tech for Good

Getting started with #techforgood – what I’ve found so far

I first started exploring ways to do more good with technology last summer having left my role as CTO at FundApps. At the time, I found it hard to know where to start, especially when it came to finding concrete actions I could take. I’ve learnt a lot since then, so wanted to share some of the amazing organisations out … Read more “Getting started with #techforgood – what I’ve found so far”

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Software Engineering

Reducing memory consumption for dynamic tabular data

At FundApps we had a semi-dynamic data schema, which could be defined by our regulatory team in accordance with the market data required to enforce regulations.

Imagine a table of stock holdings like the below, with potentially millions of rows, and possibly a few hundred column headers. The data was sparse, but with much overlap in data according to the … Read more “Reducing memory consumption for dynamic tabular data”

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Startups and Business Tech for Good

Have you taken the Founders Pledge?

In the midst of growing FundApps, I gave far less time to charity than I’d have liked. Despite the generous volunteering policy we established, at a personal level my charity amounted to a few small donations, a little micro-finance, and some occasional volunteering.

I countered this feeling of ‘I should do more’ with a vague notion. That is, if against … Read more “Have you taken the Founders Pledge?”

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Startups and Business Tech for Good

Replacing maternity & paternity with parental leave

A friend of mine recently went to his head of HR to arrange shared parental leave. They had no clue how the process worked, asked him how he was going to cover the work, and warned that it might not be possible. My friend had to calmly point out that this was in fact their problem, not his – and … Read more “Replacing maternity & paternity with parental leave”