As developers, how can we make our developments more sustainable?

[ajmaradiaga]

As developers we spend a lot of time online. Not just sitting in front a computer/laptop but also through our tablets, mobiles, watches, IoT devices, the servers/services we run, we create a lot of data, we download/stream a lot of it, our backups, etc. We do interact a lot online and all these interactions require energy to be up and running.

I believe we can make our developments more sustainable, if we can reduce the time something is on, online, running, we reduce our energy consumption.

In the blog post published in SAP Community - https://blogs.sap.com/2022/07/25/as-developers-how-can-we-make-our-developments-more-sustainable/ -, I share some of my ideas on how we can reduce energy consumption....

• Access data faster:
  - Optimise an algorithm
  - Cache
  - Indices on tables
• Not everything needs to be online 24/7, we can assess how long something really needs to be running. For example:
  - Personal workstation
  - Development systems/servers
  - PoCs
  - Personal servers
• Backups: Not everything requires a backup
  - Redundant data
  - Validity of some data
  - Data that's generated from other data
  - Consider offline

Looking forward to reading your thoughts/comments on how you make your developments more sustainable.

[qmacro]

A very interesting topic. Here are some random thoughts from me on what might help:

- more solid state storage, be that RAM or SSD based secondary (disk) storage: less spinning metal, lower power consumption

- serverless: lambda functions that are only spun up and executed when required means that fewer resources are used to listen constantly for requests

- more async comms: message based asynchronous communication between services and systems, rather than polling, means fewer resources are used constantly and for no real purpose

I was going to add one more, just to be controversial:

- use languages that reduce the time to develop and test, and reduce the complexities required to carry out computation; this means no Java or any other horrendously boilerplate heavy languages (and J2EE? don't even go there, so much ceremony and complexity for no real return), and possibly moving away from the complexities and layers that object orientation brings to languages

And perhaps a trivial but nonetheless significant one:

- the move from plain text to rich (i.e. HTML based) emails caused an explosion of data transfer; what would be measured in bytes or very low numbers of kilobytes of content is now measured in megabytes in many cases. Add email signatures on top, many with images, and that's 95% unnecessary data that gets transferred in what is still a very common communications medium, Let's cut this out

[ajmaradiaga]

Thanks for sharing @qmacro !