The topic of sustainability affects us all. Climate change has also increased the call for sustainability in the technology world. Green IT has therefore already been improved in some areas, such as enabling the recycling of electronics or feeding the hardware with green electricity. However, the software world is becoming increasingly complex and applications are consuming more and more electricity. Through green coding, the code should be considered as a source of savings. The software should become more sustainable, that is, more maintainable, more efficient and, above all, more power-efficient. We, too, in a software development company, want to focus more on Green Coding and make our contribution to sustainable development.
At BREDEX GmbH, we have had the Communites of Practice (CoP) Green Coding since June 2023. Here, enthusiasts of BREDEX from the software development and testing area meet to shed more light on the topic for BREDEX. Independently, topics around sustainability are to be defined for ourselves, measurabilities are to be clarified and tried out, and the feeling for necessary refactorings in case of bottlenecks is to be gained.
5 Tips for Green Coding:
- Choose a sustainable programming language
If you are starting a new project, you can use overview tables on the energy consumption of individual programming languages to help you decide.
- Avoid unnecessary lines of code
Lean, well-structured code saves memory and improves performance. A “I can use that later” rarely applies.
- Find your bottlenecks
There is software that can analyze your code and even methodically give you power consumption. By observing or using such software, you can find places to optimize.
- Get a feel for refactoring code
Weigh whether time and effort justify refactoring. Coding also costs power. Record your findings in decision logs.
- No code is the best code
Shut down your application as long as no one is using your code. In the age of cloud services, the application is quickly back online when needed.
The goal should be to deliver faster and more efficient software to users. Other benefits would include more readable code, lower costs for the customer, and happier users. Best of all, there will be less impact on the environment. Less electricity and CO2 will be consumed, and in addition, less hardware will need to be replaced or purchased.
Experience is to be gathered with the CoP by the end of the year, and then disseminated within the company via possible seminars or workshops. This is in the spirit of software modernization, but also as a basis for new projects.
We will keep you up to date!
Author
Lasse Heilemann
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