Lorenzo Pieri

Sustainable me. A tale of good design.

The internet's CO2 emissions rival the entire aviation industry. Learn how developers can fight climate change, one div at a time.

Sustainable me. A tale of good design.
#1about 7 minutes

The surprising environmental impact of the internet

The internet's CO2 emissions are comparable to the aviation industry, driven by massive growth in traffic and data center usage.

#2about 4 minutes

Analyzing the carbon footprint of different websites

A comparison of a personal blog, Twitter, and an activist site reveals how page size and assets impact CO2 emissions.

#3about 2 minutes

Understanding how dark mode affects energy consumption

Dark themes only save energy on OLED screens where black pixels are turned off, unlike LCD screens which use a constant backlight.

#4about 7 minutes

Applying good design principles for sustainability

Use tools like Karma Metrix to measure your footprint and apply Dieter Rams' principles of good design to create simpler, more efficient products.

#5about 2 minutes

Writing efficient and sustainable CSS

Reduce your site's carbon footprint by minifying CSS, removing unused styles, and understanding browser rendering phases like layout, paint, and composite.

#6about 4 minutes

Reducing JavaScript's impact with smaller bundles

Small reductions in JavaScript bundle size, achieved through tree shaking and careful library selection, have a massive compounding effect on CO2 emissions at scale.

#7about 3 minutes

Optimizing images and fonts for sustainability

Improve performance and reduce energy use by serving responsive images in modern formats like WebP and loading only the necessary font weights with variable fonts.

#8about 2 minutes

Leveraging caching and edge computing for efficiency

Reduce latency and power consumption by using CDNs and edge computing to serve content from servers physically closer to the user.

#9about 5 minutes

Sustainable habits for developers beyond coding

Embrace asynchronous communication, choose green cloud hosting, and build accessible websites to create a broader positive environmental impact.

#10about 4 minutes

Resources and a call to action for sustainable engineering

Explore resources like envirotechnical.eu and make a personal commitment to regularly check and improve the carbon footprint of your projects.

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