Michael AndersenBad code is a form of forced obsolescence. Every site that needs a flagship phone to feel responsive nudges someone toward an upgrade they didn’t need.
New article out on my Substack talking about the future of the web and whether I think it can become more ethical. I dive into surveillance, the Wild West we built ourselves and e-waste:
The cloud isn’t floating somewhere above us.
It’s in buildings. Thousands of them. Running on electricity, right now, as you read this.
Everything digital has a physical root. And that changes how you should think about everything you build. 🧵
Accessibility and sustainability share the same foundation. A lightweight website loads faster on slow connections. Semantic HTML helps both screen readers and search engines. Optimized images use less bandwidth for everyone. When you build for accessibility, you’re already building sustainably.
Dark mode can save between 39% and 47% of battery power on OLED displays. Over a billion smartphones worldwide use OLED. That’s a lot of energy we can help people save by simply starting with a dark-mode first approach.
Do you design dark mode first or light mode first?
I once tested downloading 10 megabytes on a 3G connection. It could take up to 15 minutes. The same 10 megabytes on fiber took 0.5 seconds. Would you wait 15 minutes for a website to load? Most people wouldn’t even wait 2 seconds.
Here’s something that still surprises people: you can write approximately 150,000 words of raw text before it takes up the same space as a single image. So the old saying “a picture says more than 1,000 words” doesn’t really apply to web development.
Discovering digital sustainability completely rewired me. I stopped grabbing familiar loops and started questioning every choice. Could a binary search work here? Am I hitting the DOM unnecessarily? Was like going from speaking a language to thinking in it.
A single web page can emit 10 grams of CO2 per visit. If that page gets 10,000 visitors a month, that’s 100 kilograms of carbon dioxide. From one page. Now multiply that by the millions of websites out there and you start to see the whole picture. Small optimizations really do matter.
Sustainable WWWA while back we helped Skydive Sweden go from lots of manual work managing signups for skydiving events and payments to having it all automated. This system implementation saves them lots of hours, and they even have an app they can use to sign in people when they arrive at the venues.
#sustainability #businessimprovement #sustainablewebdesign #sustainabledevelopment #sustainabilitymatters