Climate friendly software

Last week I read Climate-friendly software, don’t fight the wrong battle by Thomas Broyer.

It’s a really good read and nicely puts into words my current understanding of striving for more sustainable software.

Key takeaways:

• Pick servers in carbon-neutral or low-carbon datacenters first, then optimize your architecture and code.
• Don’t be the one that will make your users change their device.
• Optimize for perceived performance and battery life.

Since writing about CO2 emissions on the web in 2020 or being featured in Wired’s article on sustainable web design a lot has happened.

Many website carbon calculators have come to life that mostly focus on total page weight. While I applaud this effort, my current belief is that not all bytes are equal. A byte of JavaScript is much more costly than a byte of image.

Instead we should be optimizing for (perceived) performance, making sure your software runs on renewable energy and that you’re using energy at times or locations where it’s highly available.

Don’t be the one that will make your users change their device.

Microsoft Azure wrote about saving CO2 using location and time shifting in Azure. I’d love to see more of this sort of stuff. It reminds me of the solar-powered version of Low Tech Magazine’s website, which simply goes offline once it runs out of stored energy coming from a single solar panel.