Energy Efficient Coding

A Conscious Effort to Develop a Better World

While digitalisation can be used to reduce carbon emissions, creating new services may cause new emission sources. Let’s bring greener principles into practice, creating an environmentally friendlier digital world.

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You can make a big difference

As digital technologies become increasingly pervasive in our society, the energy consumption and carbon emissions associated with software infrastructure and operations have become significant contributors to overall environmental degradation. Green coding aims to mitigate these consequences by promoting sustainable practices that optimise resource usage throughout the software development lifecycle.

By championing eco-friendly coding techniques and best practices, developers can contribute to global sustainability efforts and help build a more environmentally conscious and sustainable digital infrastructure for the future.

Modern software development practices is a great start. Thus, quality assurance and best practices are key to ensuring software sustainability – saving both processing power and human time and energy.

Green coding is important because it addresses the growing concern over the environmental impact of software development and operation.

Principles

1. Embrace green coding practices

Optimise energy consumption in programming. Measure or simulate your energy optimisation efforts; developing software that prioritises performance and energy efficiency contributes significantly to overall sustainability.

2. Write efficient code

Minimise computational demands and reduce the need for frequent hardware upgrades. This helps to lower the energy consumption associated with running applications.

3. Keep it as simple as possible

Reusing code blocks and adopting a modular design not only saves development time but also lowers energy consumption, making your code easier to follow and extend.

4. Sustainability in the definition of done

Add sustainability aspects to your definition of done. This way you can make sure that environmental sustainability is a continuous effort.

5. Lifecycle Management

Consider the environmental impact across the entire software lifecycle—from development and deployment to maintenance and decommissioning—while implementing strategies to minimise waste and maximise efficiency at each stage.

Have you ensured that all assets are optimised, and utilised cache efficiently for static assets?

Takeouts from our evaluation checklist 1/3
Are there multiple dependencies that might hinder development in the future or make the reusable or general components obsolete?

Takeouts from our evaluation checklist 2/3
Have you implemented a sensible API call policy to prevent unnecessary calls?

Takeouts from our evaluation checklist 3/3

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Contents:

Theme introduction & Principles
Checklists for the 4 themes to evaluate your work with

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Introduction & theory

22.01.2024 DIGITAL SOCIETY

A Conscious Effort to Develop a Better World

You can make a big difference

Green coding is important because it addresses the growing concern over the environmental impact of software development and operation.