Climate change: What can we do as developers?
Climate change is real, and it's happening now. Maybe you think that there's not much else you can do as an individual. Sure, you can cycle to work, reduce the amount of plastic you use… but what is this compared to all those big companies that do most of the damage? Well, if you are a developer, you might have more power than you think to change things. Read on! 🌱
Climate change and the tech community
Callum Macrae's talk in Vue.js Amsterdam is the perfect introduction to the topic. Did you know that the average website produces 1.76 grams CO2 per page view? He shares a collection of performance tips to improve your website, as well as some tools to measure its impact. Our site generates 0.74g of CO2, but we will try to do better! A greener website is usually a faster website, so everybody wins 🚀
Watch Callum Macrae - Climate change and the tech community - Vue.js Amsterdam 2020
A solar-powered website
Taking those performance tips one step further (or several), Low-tech magazine built a self-hosted, solar powered website ☀️ Running off-the-grid and on limited energy storage, they had to think about performance on all levels, and took some bold design decisions like skipping custom typefaces and logos, and using dithered images. It's probably not going to be easy to convince clients and designers to go all the way with this approach, but we should think twice before loading two custom typefaces with 3 different weights each.
Read how LOW←TECH MAGAZINE was built.
Conferences
Covid-19 has put all in-person conferences on hold at least until the end of summer. This new reality has made people quickly adapt and start thinking about new ways to run conferences, as Michael Bernstein writes in "It's time for conference.next
". But even when the Covid-19 crisis is over, we need to keep in mind that flying speakers and attendees across the globe has a tremendous impact on climate change. We all love attending conferences, but we should adjust to the new reality and prefer attending local conferences, as well as remote ones.