from click to carbon

There are a number of factors that contribute to how much impact software products have on the environment. We have to consider how the software is developed and maintained, where it is executed as well as how, where and even when it is consumed.

In general the main cause of emissions from software products is by the resources used for developing, hosting and consuming them, whether via the hardware goods creation, transportation, maintenance and disposal or the energy they consume whilst in use.

For a software product like a website, take this blog as an example, then it was developed on a software engineers device, the code stored somewhere, the application built and then published to servers for hosting, then there are a myriad of network devices routing requests and serving pages to the end users device. There are actually quite a lot of hops, physical devices and energy being consumed whilst serving up an innocent looking webpage…

Fear not, as you read the articles in this blog you will get insights into how I am trying to make it as low impact as possible whilst increasing awareness of the issues and potential solutions. You can even see the estimated carbon emissions as you view wiat.io on each page in the footer thanks to the Website Carbon Calculator.

One of the great sources of information on this journey into sustainable software products was from the Green Software Foundation including the Linux Foundation certification course Green Software Practitioner. I highly recommend and would encourage anyone involved in software products to take the course to understand how to measure and improve the sustainability of your software.

I wanted to get the ball rolling on this blog, so this particular article is a little light on details, but I will make sure I go into more depth on areas of software emissions and how we can tackle them in further articles.