IF Project Updates 24/7/24

[Joseph Cook]

Hi IFers!

Please find a summary of our most recent updates below - you can also check out some more detail in our Github Issue.

Announcements

We've shipped phased execution in IF - you can still run IF using `if-run` as before, but now if you want to isolate a specific phase of the execution you can run with the `--observe`, `--regroup` or `compute` flags. 

See here for details: https://if.greensoftware.foundation/major-concepts/manifest-file

We will also skip the monthly call at the end of July as many people are on vacation. 

What we've been working on

Another great fortnight for IF - we shipped a lot of updates that have brought us ahead of schedule on our i/o epic.

The most substantial change has been refactoring IF to implement "phased execution". This is an important change because it enables IF to run in a greener way because you do not have to re-execute an entire manifest when you want to make tweaks or run experiments.

We also moved away from exhaust plugins and towards exhaust scripts. This allows IF to be more feature minimal - it only outputs yaml files. Alternative output formats are now handled with separate scripts that take IF output yaml files as inputs.

I have been working on using IF to do a Lifecycle Assessment for our project, which has surfaced some interesting observations about how IF can be used for multiple purposes, including scope 3 carbon accounting and calculating SCi scores. To support this, we've shipped some new plugins, including one that wraps the Github API and one that wraps Green Coding Berlin's EcoCI API to grab energy and carbon stats for our Github actions.

We also added an "explainer" feature to IF that allows you to list out the parameters being ingested and output by each plugin and their units in the manifest, helping you to check the flow of units through an execution pipeline.

Finally, we've started to think about redesigning our project website to make it more accessible for our users, and also updated the existing website to explain all these IF protocol changes!

Ways to Contribute

It's been fantastic to see community members snapping up issues from our board - we've had several things picked off the backlog by open source heroes this fortnight!

We have some open issues on the board still - look out for the `good-first-issue` label for good introductory tasks to take on. There are also some more substantial tasks if you are more experienced or feeling brave!

Thanks everyone,

Joseph

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Joseph Cook

Product Owner: Impact Framework, 

Green Software Foundation

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