Sustainable Web Engineering

What do digital technologies and civil aviation have in common? They emit approximately the same amount of greenhouse gas. An enormous amount of energy is needed to develop, host, and access digital products. As a tech startup, your goal is to grow and rapidly expand the number of users. However, the more users you have the bigger is your impact on ecology.
Digital technologies are a broad industry. In this session, we will focus on one of the most popular digital platforms—the web. We will discuss how web apps impact global ecology and what we as web developers and tech leads can do to lower it and make our startups more sustainable.

Transcript

1. @jevgeniazi
2. @jevgeniazi Hi! 👋 Eugenia Zigisova @jevgeniazi Frontend Engineer at RapidAPI—a platform to build, test, use, and share APIs
3. @jevgeniazi >4 mln ~1mln 8mln Number of users
4. @jevgeniazi Growth vs Sustainability
5. @jevgeniazi Digital = Immaterial
6. @jevgeniazi Digital tech emits 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions Resource: https://theshiftproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Excutive-Summary_EN_The-unsustainable-use-of-online-video.pdf
7. @jevgeniazi Aviation accounts for 2.5% ✈ Resource: https://www.atag.org/facts- fi gures.html
8. @jevgeniazi kg of CO2 361 per one EU resident Resource: https://www.greenit.fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/EU-Study-LCA-7-DEC-EN.pdf =
9. @jevgeniazi 416 TWh of electricity the Internet consumes per year > Resource: https://www.websitecarbon.com/
10. @jevgeniazi Why?
11. @jevgeniazi Source: https://github.com/thegreenwebfoundation/co2.js
12. @jevgeniazi are spent on the mobile phones per day 3.3 hrs Resource: https://explodingtopics.com/blog/smartphone-usage-stats
13. @jevgeniazi How to reduce carbon footprint?
14. @jevgeniazi Measure
15. @jevgeniazi websitecarbon.com Web carbon calculator
16. @jevgeniazi Data transfer per visit Carbon Factor Energy Usage per GB See the methodology described: https://sustainablewebdesign.org Emissions per page visit
17. @jevgeniazi Web development
18. @jevgeniazi UX that doesn’t hook user attention
19. @jevgeniazi Dark mode
20. @jevgeniazi Put your website on a diet
21. @jevgeniazi 13 % 5 % 18 % 64 % Images Javascript Fonts Other Average website weight Resource: https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2021/page-weight#storage
22. @jevgeniazi Optimise images Check: web.dev/fast/#optimize-your-images
23. @jevgeniazi Average webpage weight KB 0 550 1100 1650 2200 2011 2013 2015 2017 2019 2021 https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2021/javascript
24. @jevgeniazi 1/3 of Javascript code is not used 🤦
25. @jevgeniazi Can 20KB code reduction save the world? 20KB 20KB share in 2200KB large website (the average website weight)
26. @jevgeniazi 20KB => 40GB https://raidboxes.io/en/blog/wordpress/wordpress-plugin-co2/
27. @jevgeniazi 40GB => 59,000 kg of CO2 https://raidboxes.io/en/blog/wordpress/wordpress-plugin-co2/
28. @jevgeniazi smartphones 7,176,916 59,000 kg CO2 is equivalent to charging https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator#results
29. @jevgeniazi Web performance checklist bit.ly/perf-123
30. @jevgeniazi Choose green hosting
31. @jevgeniazi https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2022/sustainability# fi g-7
32. @jevgeniazi Email subscriptions
33. @jevgeniazi
34. @jevgeniazi stays unread 80%
35. @jevgeniazi thanks-in-advance.com
36. @jevgeniazi trees to be planted to o ff set the pollution caused by email spam 1.6 billion Resource: https://gerrymcgovern.com/books/world-wide-waste/introduction-why-digital-is-killing-our-planet/
37. @jevgeniazi More mindful marketing newsletters
38. @jevgeniazi Digital ≠ Immaterial. Every digital action costs energy.
39. @jevgeniazi Useful links • Slides: speakerdeck.com/imeugenia/sustainable-web-engineering • Website emission calculations: sustainablewebdesign.org • Performance checklist: bit.ly/perf-123 • Stats about emails: https://thanks-in-advance.com/ Thank you! 🌱