Gaslight & Steam Dev Blog

As a current computer science major, I’m glad to see the ACM in a joint effort to help organize Computer Science Education Week (CSEdWeek), which started December 7th. The week was chosen specifically in honor of Rear Admiral Dr. Grace Murray Hopper, also known as “Amazing Grace”, or “a little old lady who talks to computers,” who was born on December 9, 1906. She was a computer science pioneer and her work, spanning computer languages, compiler verification, software development concepts, and much more, has served to inspire a generation of computer scientists.

With the recent heatwave in Seattle, we discovered that one of the joys of working in a LEED-certified building is that there are controls on how long the air-conditioning can be run (or rather, I suppose, the usage of energy to run the building). That means it wouldn’t kick on until after the sun had already come up, making for some warm mornings in any areas with east-facing windows. For me, I always thought LEED Certification was one of those one-time things, not an ongoing set of practices. Obviously, that would defeat the whole point of sustainability, though the biggest issue seems to be planning intelligently for the future for the life of the building along with developing practices to that purpose. It’s not just as simple as following a checklist.

Beyond LEED-certified buildings, my company has taken other steps to be more environmentally-friendly. It’s not an easy thing to accomplish and a recent review pointed out that not only is it hard to do, it’s also hard to measure:

“The hope is that people are not intentionally misrepresenting themselves; they just don’t understand how challenging it is to be “green.” The important lesson we wanted people to take away from our presentation was that you have to ask questions — lots of questions.”

“Determining whether Group Health was doing a good job wasn’t as easy to decide as those involved thought it would be. The questions to be reviewed turned out to be more difficult than anticipated; in many cases, figuring out the answers wasn’t simple.”

Other companies struggle to implement green policies too. Over at Timberland, they’ve introduced a number of measures to make their business more environmentally friendly including only buying leather that doesn’t deplete the Amazon biome and painting their roof white. But it’s not as easy as it might seem, particularly when it comes to banning bottled water.

In the Earthkeeper blog, Jeff Swartz, the President & CEO of Timberland, noted, “It’s really exhilarating to want to run a more sustainable business… but to actually do it is really freaking hard.”