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Most of your code is now written with AI. You still have to know what makes it green.
The developer's job has shifted. You describe what you want, a tool produces it, and you decide whether to accept it, often faster than you can read it. That only works if you can tell efficient code from wasteful code. Fifteen modules on what makes software green, applied to the three things you now do: write it, generate it, review it.
18h
15
30 question
80%
Certification
Green Software Developer
How the course works
Four footprints
Runtime work, the demand your code creates, the generated code you accept, and your own development loop. Naming all four tells you which one a problem belongs to.
A demand model first
Five lines: trigger, frequency, growth, consumption, elasticity. Written before the work, it tells you whether the work is worth doing at all.
Patterns with the trade stated
Five fields: precondition, mechanism, trade-off, verification, cadence. Anything missing those is advice.
Why take this course
You are approving code you did not write
Generated code follows the average of what it learned from, and that average is full of a query per row, results with no limit, and retries with no ceiling. If you cannot name those patterns, you cannot ask for better or reject what comes back.
Green is not the same as fast
They often agree. Prefetching, sending two requests and taking the first reply, and keeping capacity warm all make things faster and all add work. The course covers the six cases where they disagree and how to decide.
Nothing tells you when you get it wrong
A slow service pages someone. A wasteful one just runs. There is no alert, so the check has to be built into what happens anyway: the default, the pipeline, the review.
Who this is for
- Developers writing production code, in any language
- Anyone generating a large share of their code with AI tools
- Reviewers approving more code than they could have written
- Tech leads deciding what the team's defaults should be
- No prior sustainability knowledge and no other GSF course needed.
Related courses:
- Green AI Prompting — the prompts and agents behind your AI features
- Building a Green AI Agent — putting this guidance inside your coding tools
- Green and Efficient Architect — the decisions above the code
- GreenOps Practitioner — running it day to day
- SCI for AI Practitioner — producing a figure you can defend
- Green Data Practitioner — the data, storage, queries and retrieval behind your code
What you will work with
A runnable lab, if you want it
A working service with ten deliberate defects. Measure it, fix them, measure again: 301 queries become 2, 140 polls become 37. Node only, no setup, no keys. Optional and not part of the credential.
Things you keep
A five-line demand model you write before you build a feature, a register of the changes you made and what each cost you, and a one-page capstone of evidence on one code path, ideally your own.
Measurement you can do today
You probably have no way to measure energy. The course uses what you do have (queries, bytes, calls and tokens) and is clear about what those numbers can and cannot prove.
What you will be able to do
Course Lessons
The full course
01
Why Water, and Why You
Software feels dry, but the buildings it runs in use water for cooling, the electricity it consumes was made using water, and the hardware was manufactured with it. This module shows those three connections and closes the gap between the people who can see the water and the people who change the software.
module-01
02
The Four Layers: building, electricity, hardware, and the stress conversion
This module gives the three ways software uses water their proper names, as the draft SWI specification uses them, and adds a fourth layer that converts litres into how much each litre matters. It ends with the only line of arithmetic in the course.
module-02
03
Consumption and Withdrawal: used up vs borrowed
Water figures come in two kinds, and confusing them is the most common mistake in reading them. This module teaches the distinction between water used up and water borrowed and returned, and the rule that the two are never added together.
module-03
04
Reading a Water Number
This module teaches no calculations. It teaches how to look at any water figure, whether a provider report, a news headline or a colleague’s slide, and know what it does and does not say.
module-04
05
Stress-Adjusted Water: a liter is not a liter
The same liter counts for more where water is scarce and for less where it is plentiful. This module turns that idea into arithmetic using a published factor per place, giving the conversion layer its full treatment at foundation depth.
module-05
06
Small Things That Save Water
The earlier modules built a vocabulary; this one turns it into actions small enough to take this week, organised by role. None of them needs a water meter, a budget or permission to run a project.
module-06
07
Final Assessment
A final assessment of 12 questions - 80% to pass, 30 minutes, retake available.
Final Assessment
Assessment & Certification
Time to complete