Kent Simonsen

11 Tips for Greener Code

A single petabyte of data can consume as much electricity as ten households. Learn 11 practical tips to reduce your code's environmental and financial cost.

11 Tips for Greener Code
#1about 3 minutes

Making green code a measurable project goal

Treat sustainability as a non-functional requirement and use tools to measure energy consumption from the cloud level down to micro-benchmarks.

#2about 3 minutes

Eliminating waste in code, infrastructure, and CI/CD

Reduce energy consumption by removing unused code and data, optimizing test frameworks with timeouts, and avoiding inefficient parallelization in CI/CD pipelines.

#3about 1 minute

Optimizing data storage and hardware lifecycle

Minimize energy usage by deleting unnecessary stored data and strategically upgrading server hardware, which has a higher operational carbon cost than its manufacturing cost.

#4about 1 minute

Writing efficient code by optimizing loops and data transfer

Improve code's energy efficiency by minimizing operations inside loops and reducing network energy use through smaller data transfers and efficient formats like Protobuf.

#5about 2 minutes

Choosing efficient languages and avoiding costly reflection

Select programming languages and algorithms based on their energy consumption profiles and avoid performance-intensive operations like reflection by using techniques like code generation.

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