Kent Simonsen

11 Tips for Greener Code

A single petabyte of data can consume as much electricity as ten households. Learn 11 practical tips to reduce your code's environmental and financial cost.

11 Tips for Greener Code
#1about 3 minutes

Making green code a measurable project goal

Treat sustainability as a non-functional requirement and use tools to measure energy consumption from the cloud level down to micro-benchmarks.

#2about 3 minutes

Eliminating waste in code, infrastructure, and CI/CD

Reduce energy consumption by removing unused code and data, optimizing test frameworks with timeouts, and avoiding inefficient parallelization in CI/CD pipelines.

#3about 1 minute

Optimizing data storage and hardware lifecycle

Minimize energy usage by deleting unnecessary stored data and strategically upgrading server hardware, which has a higher operational carbon cost than its manufacturing cost.

#4about 1 minute

Writing efficient code by optimizing loops and data transfer

Improve code's energy efficiency by minimizing operations inside loops and reducing network energy use through smaller data transfers and efficient formats like Protobuf.

#5about 2 minutes

Choosing efficient languages and avoiding costly reflection

Select programming languages and algorithms based on their energy consumption profiles and avoid performance-intensive operations like reflection by using techniques like code generation.

Related jobs
Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.

Matching moments

The business case for sustainable high performance
03:34 MIN

The business case for sustainable high performance

Sustainable High Performance: Build It or Pay the Price

The industry's focus on frameworks over web fundamentals
11:32 MIN

The industry's focus on frameworks over web fundamentals

WeAreDevelopers LIVE – Frontend Inspirations, Web Standards and more

Actionable tips for employers and employees
09:16 MIN

Actionable tips for employers and employees

Sustainable High Performance: Build It or Pay the Price

The emerging market for fixing AI-generated code
04:09 MIN

The emerging market for fixing AI-generated code

Devs vs. Marketers, COBOL and Copilot, Make Live Coding Easy and more - The Best of LIVE 2025 - Part 3

Organizing a developer conference for 15,000 attendees
01:32 MIN

Organizing a developer conference for 15,000 attendees

Cat Herding with Lions and Tigers - Christian Heilmann

Rapid-fire thoughts on the future of work
02:44 MIN

Rapid-fire thoughts on the future of work

What 2025 Taught Us: A Year-End Special with Hung Lee

The security risks of AI-generated code and slopsquatting
05:55 MIN

The security risks of AI-generated code and slopsquatting

Slopquatting, API Keys, Fun with Fonts, Recruiters vs AI and more - The Best of LIVE 2025 - Part 2

The only frontend stack that truly matters
11:10 MIN

The only frontend stack that truly matters

WeAreDevelopers LIVE – Frontend Inspirations, Web Standards and more

Featured Partners

Related Videos

See all videos
Green Cloud Computing35:20

Green Cloud Computing

Doreen Sacker

A Hitchhiker's Guide to Resource Efficient Software29:30

A Hitchhiker's Guide to Resource Efficient Software

Hendrik Lösch

It's not easy being green1:02:22

It's not easy being green

Marjolein Pordon

Reducing the carbon footprint of your website30:07

Reducing the carbon footprint of your website

Ines Akrap

Introducing Green IT practices to a large Software Company29:31

Introducing Green IT practices to a large Software Company

Pierre-Luc Noel & Fritz Reichmann

Minimising the Carbon Footprint of Workloads27:46

Minimising the Carbon Footprint of Workloads

Michael Mueller

An Architect’s guide to reducing the carbon footprint of your applications55:18

An Architect’s guide to reducing the carbon footprint of your applications

Ricardo Sueiras Sueiras

Sustainable me. A tale of good design.1:05:49

Sustainable me. A tale of good design.

Lorenzo Pieri

Related Articles

View all articles
LM
Luis Minvielle
A Guide to Green Tech and Green IT Careers
Even though examples of green, sustainable technologies are as old as lazing and lounging in a Roman hot tub, green tech has experienced a big boom in the last few years as climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution threaten our planet. By gree...
A Guide to Green Tech and Green IT Careers
DC
Daniel Cranney
Is Software Development Making the Climate Crisis Worse?
The incredible rate at which technology is developing is clear for all to see. Each week here at WeAreDevelopers, we hear about exciting innovations in the realms of hardware, software, devices, infrastucture, and (of course) AI. Each one presents op...
Is Software Development Making the Climate Crisis Worse?

From learning to earning

Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.

Full Stack Engineer

Full Stack Engineer

Climax.eco
Rotterdam, Netherlands

€70-100K
Senior
TypeScript
PostgreSQL
Cloud (AWS/Google/Azure)