Sustainability and Tech and Us
Published on SepĀ 17, 2023 (updated FebĀ 5, 2024), filed under development (feed). (Share this on Mastodon orĀ Bluesky?)
Iām about to finish I just finished Gerry McGovernās excellent book, World Wide Waste. The book is about the physicality of digital, about how we create and contribute to mind-boggling wasteāand what we, as web professionals, can do.
Some of this youāll know and find easy to relate to, like the following:
[ā¦]from the code to the content, everything about Web design has become super-bloated and super-polluting. Consider that if a typical webpage that weighs 4Ā MB is downloaded 600,000 times, one tree will need to be planted in order to deal with the resulting pollution.
What I find troubling is how in tech, weāre truly exceptionally bad at sustainability.
Weāre part of the problem, of driving this planet against a wall (from which we may not recover).
I want to finish the book before investing and commenting more on the topic. However, while those of us who focus on sustainability, performance, as well as code minimalism are already contributing to improvements, we can all do more.
Some Things We Can Do (More Of)
Letās use performance as a segue for sustainability, for the smaller our sites, the less energy and therefore resources they need:
If you want to help save the planet, reduce digital weight. Clean up your website. Before you add an image, make sure that it does something useful and itās the most optimized image possible. Every time you add code, make sure it does something useful and itās the leanest code possible. Always be on the lookout for waste images, waste code, waste content. Get into the habit of removing something every time you add something.
Accordingly, letās tailor and tree-shake and minify and compress the hell out of things.
Contributing to better performance and therefore sustainability, letās also value minimalism more (Iāve written about minimal web development, and my Upgrade Your HTML book seriesānote the latest editionāis all about minimal HTML).
Letās squeeze out all the code, starting withāspeaking of minimal HTMLāomitting optional markup.
Letās clean up after ourselves. Letās delete unnecessary code, assets, and content.
Letās push back on āfire and forget.ā
Letās also re-evaluate our understanding of professionalism; letās make sustainability part of what makes a professional web developer.
Letās make sustainability part of our profilesālike accessibility or, I wish, conformance.
Letās aim for a different kind of experience:
Before you do anything in digital, think about its impact on the environment. Think about the Earth Experience, not just the user or customer experience. Focus on reducing the weight of your digital footprint.
ā§ It isnāt new that we seem to choose to drive into walls. But we can also always make different choices.
As web professionals, we can choose differently about how wasteful we want us and our work to be.
Iām writing this in a hurry, and it will be amazingāand so importantāfor us all to talk more, within and without our field.
About Me
Iām Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and Iām a web developer, manager, and author. Iāve been working as a technical lead and engineering manager for companies youāve never heard of and companies you use every day, Iām an occasional contributor to web standards (like HTML, CSS, WCAG), and I write and review books for OāReilly and Frontend Dogma.
I love trying things, not only in web development and engineering management, but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my experiences and views. (I value you being critical, interpreting charitably, and giving feedback.)