What is this book?

The core aim of this book is to highlight the relationship between web application development and climate change such that you can make it a factor in your technical decision-making.

The main bulk of the text presents ideas and examples to illustrate how we can contribute to reducing the energy cost of the applications we develop. It also explores some of the major themes that you might encounter when approaching this subject within your organisation or in your daily life, and aims to address some of the questions you may have about sustainable web development.

The intended audience for this book is anyone who is involved in the development of web applications - not only web developers but also peripheral roles such as content creators, delivery managers, product owners and scrum masters. It is not necessary to read this book in chapter order, neither is it necessary to read the book in its entirity if you are only interested in a particular aspect of development. The following list details the major themes that are covered.

  • General Tips applicable to all aspects of web development.

  • Styles and how they can be made more efficient.

  • Content and Markup - the information that your applications deliver to users and its structure.

  • Frontend code that runs on client machines - JavaScript or otherwise.

  • Backend code that runs on your own pysical servers or in the cloud.

  • Images - often the biggest offender in terms of a client's energy footprint and often where the lowest hanging fruit is in terms of optimising.

There is a lot more to running sustainable web applications than just these themes, however these are what we will focus on here - Appendix A provides references to some additional resources if you don't find what you're looking for in the above list.

What is this book not?

It is also worth quickly pointing out what this book is not.

  • This book assumes that you believe that climate change is real and makes no attempt to convince you of this fact. The climate crisis itself is only mentioned very briefly.
  • This book assumes you already have a working knowledge of web development (although a complete working knowledge is not required if you are only interested in particular aspects). I have, however, attempted to make the text as accessible to all audiences as possible.
  • This book is not an exhaustive list of everything you need to do to create sustainable web applications. Here we mainly focus on some of the major themes and present some examples to give you a flavour of the kinds of things you can do
  • This book does not concern itself too much with the science of measuring energy usage. Whilst this is an important factor, there is already plenty of research out there which does a much better job of exploring this topic than I ever could. Some of these are referenced in Appendix A.