A bit over 4 years ago I moved back to Japan, without a stable job. I had been contracting for 3 or 4 years in the US, but a difference in time zones (GMT+9 vs GMT - 4) made that difficult to maintain. I had heard about a Python shop called BeProud and they were remote friendly.

There weren't many remote friendly companies at the time in Japan, let alone companies that specialized in Python consulting. Being full-remote friendly signaled to me that they'd have a progressive company culture where I'd fit.

It was a fun just over 4 years, my longest tenure to date. My co-workers were great, bosses nice, and the projects (mostly) fun. Work-life balance is taken seriously (I took 6-weeks of (paid) parental leave after my son was born without any issues – something that's still rare in Japan).

If you can speak Japanese and sling Python, they're a great company filled with great people.

So why leave?

Climate change. Like many, for years I've worried about climate change. But I didn't know where to begin, beyond voting for people that take it seriously and reduce flights/driving where possible. But the challenge is bigger than any individual.

The most important change society is going to need to make is is getting our emissions to net zero. As fast as we can. And the biggest leaver is changing how we power (⚡️) our society. Japan currently gets 69% of its electricity from fossil fuels. Any way I can help lower this number, beyond just changing my personal electricity, is something worth spending my time and effort doing.

Like many, while I am worried about climate change and want to help, each time I looked for how I could get involved in non-superficial ways it either required engineering or chemistry expertise that I don't have or in the wrong location or some other  factor that didn't line up. Until now.

Octopus Energy, one of Europe's largest investors in renewable energy, is a working to make a "green dent in the universe".  They do this in a number of ways:

1. As an electricity provider, they offer dynamic tariffs that move with the wholesale price of electricity. Using data science and machine learning, they then help their customers take advantage of renewables by increasing electricity usage when there's an abundance of energy on the grid (which is usually when there's a lot of renewables producing  electricity) and reduce usage when there's less abundance (and usually dirtier, fossil fuels).
2. They're generating their own green electricity that they put on the grid.
3. They sell and service electric vehicles
4. They're making green-Hydrogen as a service.

The system that powers all of this is called Kraken and they're bringing it to the US, Australia, and Japan (in partnership with Tokyo Gas), allowing customers to take advantage of cheap green energy and reduce demand when it's mostly fossil fuels. 

Starting in October, I'll  be working on the integrations that allow  Kraken to be used in Japan and helping de-carbonize Japan's electricity supply. Hopefully over the coming years this 69% will decrease.With any luck, my work will directly contribute to driving that number to 0% as quick as possible.

While I'm sad to leave BeProud and co-workers I enjoyed working for and with, the opportunity to use my skills to fight climate change in a meaningful way is not one that I could pass up. To my new co-workers, I look forward to working together to make our green dent.

4 years. Glad they were successful.

Computing and infrastructure currently use around 11% of the world's electricity and is projected to grow 3 - 4 times over the next 20 years. As makers of software (and hardware) we've got to find a way to extend the lifespan of devices for as long as possible.

25-years on the same mobile phone. I can't even imagine. I'd love it if that were possible in today's world. Maybe if it was a "dumb" phone. But even then wireless network's lifespans aren't even that long these days. 

I used my iPhone 6S+ for around 4 years until a pin broke on it and I could no longer charge it. "Repairing" it (my first option) would have meant getting a new iPhone 6S+ for half the cost of a brand new iPhone XR. I hope I can keep my phone for at least as long as I've had my current computer (7 - 8 years).

Where I live in Yokohama we have some small forests that they've decided to turn into parks. There's some paths through them, they're nice. I'm not sure if they're "native" forests or not, but the patches of green are nice.

Trees are something I've found myself become more of an advocate for as I've gotten older. We need more of them. Not just for the carbon capture features, but for the purely practical reasons: their shade helps cool us down and they clean the air. There's also some psychological benefits of seeing green, too.

---

Growing up in southern California, our house was a typical post-war ranch style house. In the back we had 3 big lemon trees that produced more lemons that any person could consume. Out front the entire street was lined with tree.  Most houses didn't have trees in their yards because of these mature trees provided shade most of the day. It was great when you were playing outside, riding your bikes and skateboards.

But these trees roots were deep and apparently starting to interfere with some plumbing. So the city decided to cut them all down. They replaced them with these young trees that looked like toothpicks in comparison.

The difference in street temperature and the harshness of the light being outside was immediate. Without trees to filter the sun going outside your house you were blinded be the light. The rest of the neighborhood kept their trees, just ours became this hot barren wasteland.

But it's been 20 years. Writing this post I looked at street view on Google maps to see what has changed. All of the trees on my street have gotten bigger and can provide enough shade for a single parked car. Except the one in front of my old house. It's still a twig (or more likely got replaced again). The city also seems to have found their way to the rest of the neighborhood as there's not much shade along the sidewalks anywhere anymore.

---

One of my favorite summer treats were tips to Knotts Berry Farm, an amusement park.  The day before we'd go we'd visit the local Vons and pickup sub rolls, deli meats, and other sandwich fixin's. We take the van (a Ford Econoline). This van had 2.5 rows for seating: two seats up front, a bench in the back, and a single seat in the middle, giving you a nice open area around the sliding door.

Knott's has multiple parking lots, but one of them was park-like and almost entirely covered in shade. We'd park there with a big cooler full of sandwich goods and drinks. During lunch we'd leave the park, enjoy the breeze, and have a nice picnic in the van. 

Sometimes, even with the trees, it was a bit warm. On those days we'd have our "Texas coolers" (a cool/ice cool wet tea towel wrapped around our neck) help. Without those trees any picnic would have been hot and miserable.

---

I don't really have a way to end this post. I just always think about trees and heat island effect more during summer and these two memories of growing up resurfaced themselves. 

One of my original reasons for building Tanzawa was I wanted a blogging engine that, while pleasant to use, put a hard focus on efficiency for the express purpose of reducing carbon emissions. This has informed a number of architecture decisions in Tanzawa itself: no big background tasks, no db server, only make optimized images on their first request to save disk / cpu and more.

To bring this in to focus, each page on Tanzawa has a badge that from websitecarbon.com that measures and reports the amount of carbon required to get that page from my server in Germany to you. It's not perfect, but it raises awareness.

I don't run any analytics on my site, so I have no idea how often people click on things on my site, but my buddy mario saw I post I wrote and  decided to test his own fusioncast.fm website.

This is the first documented instance I have of people being inspired to reduce the carbon impact of their sites based on my work! One site down, a million left :)

This was my first week using Tanzawa to power my actual blog and not just the dev blog. So far it's been great. I love how easy it is to post. I love that my site is IndieWeb native. I love that my site's stability has improved because I no longer require a database server. And I love that it's using fewer resources. It's great.

This said, there's been a few rough edges that need polishing. Approving 50 some-odd webmentions after OwnYourSwarm started importing un-sent checkins required 50 some-odd page loads. Ouch. 

I'd also like to improve site performance more in respect to images. Currently Tanzawa automatically requests the most efficient image format that your browser supports. Image format selection is all handled by the browser automatically (no Javascript). This alone usually cuts transfer size in half.

While cutting the transfer size in half with a format change is a good start, I still don't need to be serving (at times) 4000px wide images. This is noticeable in streams where posts usually have images ( Checkins etc..) where the text loads instantly, but the progress bar lingers while images load.

Rather, I'm going to change it to serve a resized (max 800px wide? ) image unless the original is specifically requested.

Lastly, I want to start building a list of things that must (not should) be done before I can feel comfortable releasing Tanzawa for others to use and then start working on that list bit-by-bit.

Love this site that shows me the air quality from around the world. The simple visualization at the bottom with a colored square for each day of the year really lets you easily see trends in air quality over time. Izumi-ku, Yokohama's air quality looks to be improving over the years. Yay!