Sustainable Web Development in Startups: Applying Green Coding Principles for a Greener Future

Hey, welcome to my talk about sustainable web development. I am Katharina Fetzer, and I want to show you some ways how to apply green coding principles in startups. But before I start, let's talk a bit about why I think this topic is important. Here you can see the medium temperatures in Germany in the last years. And like that, it is in many countries here in Germany, the temperatures are rising higher and higher. And in the last few years, we were already above 1.0 degrees above average. And these rising temperatures lead to more and more extreme weather, for example, drought, wildfires, and also floods. And all these pictures were taken in Europe in the last five years. But these events are happening all over the world and they are happening right in front of us. And although we can already see the impact of climate change, there's still not enough action taken. And now you might wonder why is this relevant for me as a developer? And the thing is, the digital world needs more and more energy. The electricity consumption is doubling almost every five years, and the CO2 emissions are already twice as high as those of global air traffic. So if you are thinking about your CO2 footprint and want to reduce flights, then thinking about the digital footprint is also a good idea. But digitalisation can also be a chance, it can also help to reduce emissions. But to do this, it's important that the digital products themselves are created in a green way. To do that, I want to present today two green coding principles. There are many more of them, and in the end, I will share a link with you where you can find more information. But today, I want to focus first on run cloud native applications and second on build lightweight applications. I also want to show you how we at High Lane implemented these principles.

Before we dive deep into these principles, a very short introduction about High Lane, the company I am currently working for. They are a start-up based in Cologne, and we are offering hydrogen trucks in a pay-per-use rental model, which makes it easier for our customers to operate these vehicles without high starting investments. And this pay-per-use model is enabled by IT because we have to process the kilometre data to create invoices at the end of the month because our customers are only paying for the kilometres they drive.

So let's start with the principles. First, run cloud native applications. Why is this a good idea? And here, to explain that, I added an example from my last workplace. I used to work for a weather company, which offered weather information online through a web page and different apps. And here you can see a normal week in summer. The first two days are very sunny and not many people are interested in the weather. There are no clouds in the sky, so it's quite boring.

But the third day is different. In the forenoon, first clouds start to form and the people start wondering, will I be able to do a barbecue in the evening or will I be able to get home with my bicycle in a dry way? Or will it rain and I have to cancel my plans? And then that's why the load is rising. And then the clouds are getting bigger and bigger. The thunderstorm is approaching a larger city. Many people are hearing the first thunders far away and many people open their app to see what's going on. And this gets quite stressful for the web server and the system administrators, because the load the web server is rising higher and higher.

The thunderstorm is approaching a larger city. Many people are hearing the first thunders far away and many people open their app to see what's going on. And this gets quite stressful for the web server and the system administrators, because the load the web server is rising higher and higher. It's reaching almost 100 percent. But this time, everything went well. We are stopping at, I don't know, 95 percent. The thunderstorm goes away and the load starts to fall again. And the next day, sunny again, weather's boring again and nobody is really interested in the weather.

Our system administrator is wondering, okay, what can I do to prevent such a stressful situation? What can I do that next time the web servers are still able to handle the load, even if the thunderstorm will be approaching a bigger city and even more people will open the apps and the web page. In the old world before the cloud, the solution for this situation would be to set up a second web server, which would have the effect that on this thunderstorm day, we would only go to 50 percent of the load. But on the other days, of course, the load would be lower as well and it would be even more boring for the servers and they would be idling around a lot of the time.

In the cloud, we can handle that scenario much better. We can use just the virtual web servers that we really need. But at the same time, we have almost infinity spare capacity because when we notice the load is rising in that moment, we can add other virtual servers and that way we are able to react to the changes in load very, very quickly. This means we have less hardware used and, yeah, also less servers idle that, yeah, are using resources. In the cloud, we have the chances that we are able to scale our virtual resources in a very flexible way.

And in the same time, other companies that might have other factors that influence the load, other companies that are not reliant on the weather, they can use the spare capacity in the time that we are not using it. So in sum, this means we have less hardware used and, yeah, also less servers idle that, yeah, are using resources. So in the cloud, we have the chances that we are able to scale our virtual resources in a very flexible way.

To stay with the example, when the weather gets more interesting, we can add virtual servers and then when it's boring again, we can reduce them. We are sharing hardware with other companies so that we need less hardware in sum. And also the cloud operator focuses on efficient operation so they can do that much better than many small and medium-sized companies would be able to. And also, like our business model, it's pay-per-use which leads to a motivation to optimize because when we add more virtual resources, of course, it's more expensive.

But there are also some risks in the cloud. For the developers, often it's easier to just scale the resources up than to optimize the processes. So we will have to do some work here to make them think about that it's also a good idea to optimize first and only scale up when we really need to. And also it might happen, especially when we have auto-scaling active, that scaling happens by mistake. But there are also some possibilities how to prevent that.

But there are also some possibilities how to prevent that.

Okay, you know, now what did we do at Highlane? We set up a cloud-first principle in our data strategy. When I started at Highlane, we didn't have any own servers and we don't plan to have them. We are a cloud-first company. We set up everything in the cloud or we are using software as a service. For us, this has the advantage that we need less administration. Also, we are able to test new setups very quickly. You know, because it's pay-per-use, it's growing with us and we don't waste hardware capacity. Because we started very small and then our own web server would be either way too big or it will get too small very fast as we are growing bigger and bigger.

So, yeah, let's continue with the second principle. It's build lightweight applications. And the aim here is to reduce computing effort and data transfer to consume less energy and to reduce emissions. And it also has some positive side effects, especially in the cloud. Less computation also means less costs. When you are reducing the data that is transferred, it also leads to faster loading of web pages and apps, which should lead to happy customers and also to a higher Google ranking. So that might also be an argument to convince your marketing department that this is a good idea. And as an example, here I use our own web page, pylane.de. And out of curiosity, in March 2024, I tried out this website carbon.com tool to get an idea about how green our web page is. And as you can see here, we were only getting a rating of D, which is not so good. At least the web page is running on sustainable energy. But then we did a bit of research. What can we do to improve the rating and to reduce emissions? And how did we do the research? First, we had a look at PageSpeed Insights, because the loading performance can serve as a proxy measurement for the emissions. Also, we looked at EcoGrader, which gave us also very good suggestions, and we got some general hints from a whole grain digital blog post. I will show you the link in the end. And the recommendations were first to optimize media, to use smaller images, and to use modern image formats. To remove unused code, there were some CSS rules and JavaScript found that was not used. And also some general hints. Generally, it's a good idea to use less images, to avoid animations and auto-playing videos, because videos need a lot of data, and then auto-playing is a very bad idea as well. And also to improve the user guidance, because if the users have to move through three or four pages to get to the place where they want to get, then you are opening three pages that don't give any advantage to the user here. So it's annoying for the user, and also you transfer more data than you need to.

And then we did a relaunch of our webpage. We used less images, and also we are using Avis images right now as a format. And by these things, we were able to reduce the emissions by almost 50%, which we are very proud of. But of course, we are not done here. We want to improve further, and also we didn't have implemented all recommendations by now.

Okay. Now I think many of you might be very interested in the topic and want to find out more about it. So here I added three links where you can start looking for more information. First, on the webpage of the Green Software Foundation, you can find all the principles of green software engineering. Then, especially for web development, I also think the Web Sustainability Guidelines are a very nice place to start your research. And third, here's also the whole grain digital blog post that helped us to improve our webpage.

Now, yeah, one last thing. We are currently looking for new colleagues. We are especially looking for a Node.js developer. So if you are interested in working with us at Highlane, then please go to our career webpage. You can find it on highlane.net slash career. And yeah, we are looking forward to your applications. Thank you very much. If you want to contact me, you can send me an email. And if you want to stay updated with Highlane, you can follow us on LinkedIn, where you get the newest information right away.