Edgar Post-Buijs Updated on Jan 31, 2024 2 min read

My goal for this blog

The best way to learn is to be able to explain things in your words to others. My goal for this blog is to do exactly that.

I don't have a detailed pre-defined plan. Because that is what I constantly try to do first, and it usually only makes me procrastinate. But I do want to give you an overview of what you may expect to see here.

There are a few things I want to achieve within Web Sustainability:

Learn the principles and paradigms
Learn how to apply best practices
Inspire others
Learn how to get organizations to put this on a higher priority
Create an (open source) tool to instrument + monitor + measure full-stack web applications' impact on climate change
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I have yet to figure out how I am going to categorize these topics, so these might change over time.

Knowledge

Before I can give Web Sustainability a bigger stage, I need to have more knowledge and understand the principles, paradigms, and theories behind its impact on climate change. I try to follow Green Software Foundation's lead because it already has a great source of information and are creating outstanding projects.

Questions that may arise are: what are the different impacts (carbon, water etc.) on climate change? What are scope 3 emissions? How do we measure things? What is the SCI? What is the Maturity Matrix? What is Impact Framework? And eventually: how do we apply these methods and frameworks?

Best practices

As we learn more about the principles of sustainability on the web, we can try to apply our knowledge as best practices.

Inspire

Inspiration is one of the most powerful tools. With each post, I hope to inspire others to do the same — whether it is giving green software more attention or just blogging about something entirely different you're passionate about. Each inspiration can in turn inspire others.

Organizations

One of the biggest hurdles, I think — aside from measuring impact — is how we can approach organizations and management and convince them to believe in green software and give it a high priority.

Tooling

I want to contribute to the community by creating tooling to instrument, monitor, and measure carbon emissions of full-stack applications. Currently, it is possible to run an audit on a single page (Synthetic monitoring), but it would be really valuable if we could have Realtime User Monitoring (RUM) from both the backend- and frontend. This data could then be run against various models in Impact Framework and hopefully give a good insight on where to improve your application.

It is quite a challenging project, and I am not sure if it is even possible, but I will try my best. I have to think of a good name too. 🤔