Sustainability is in our DNA

From development to building customer relationships, how we work is driven by our mission to help preserve the health of the planet. The journey to more sustainable business practices and development helps our clients, local communities, and the rest of the world in different ways, so we are pretty proud of the fact that we can help the environment and deliver top quality solutions at the same time. In fact, it is all interconnected.

What is green development?

Green development is a practice of developing software and website solutions that use the least possible amount of network bandwidth and processing power. Green development is based on recommended development practices towards computational power, memory, and network. By using the least amount of processing power to deliver top quality solutions, we help our clients reduce their carbon footprint on the environment.

How do your solutions help reduce a website's carbon footprint?

All code needs to run on some kind of a computer, which in turn needs to be powered by electricity. The more intensive the computation that is being performed by the code, the more power computers running it use. Sometimes there is no way around a complex and intensive computation, however, most of the time, website code is written in a careless way that unnecessarily forces computers to perform complex computations, in turn wasting energy. Our code is optimized for energy use that helps reduce the amount of power that computers running it consume.

Why is increased energy consumption a bad thing?

Not all energy is equal. Some is created in a sustainable way, while some is still using old factories that pollute the environment in many ways. While each state in the US is moving at different speeds towards cleaner energy, when power grids get overwhelmed with demand for power, they have to resort to dirty power. Our goal is to do our part in reducing the contribution of websites we build towards the demand for more power, thus helping reduce the amount of time power grids have to tap into the old factories.

What are the principles of green development?

There are many recommended and general best practices, and they all in general focus on architectures, development methodologies, patterns, and practices that are recommended for many reasons outside of sustainability. It just so happens that these practices also in turn help us reduce the processing power usage. Here are some areas of focus for green development:

• Edge delivery - delivering statically generated pages reduces the amount of runtime processing. At the same time, this practice helps significantly speed up page performance.
• Uptime and reliability - reliable solutions consume more power. Each outage results in increased power use from additional activities around it; from simple hardware and application restarts to involving teams of engineers to bring it back up. We build solutions that have a guaranteed SLA!
• Smart resource usage - using CPU and memory carefully and freeing up resources when not used. This practice helps reduce hosting costs, whether in the cloud or on-premise.
• Network bandwidth preservation - focusing on reducing the number of trips data has to do "across the wire" as well as reducing data payloads helps us reduce the power consumed by companies powering the networking infrastructure. Headless website development is one of the aspects of network bandwidth preservation.
• Least amount of code and general development standard use - the less code we have to write to accomplish the task - the fewer resources we will consume. It also happens that this practice helps reduce the amount of mainteance required, which helps reduce long-term maintenance cost.

How does green development help me as a client?

As mentioned above, green practices overlap in many ways with best development practices, and as a result, not only do our development practices help the environment, they also benefit our clients:

• Fast page loading speed - the faster the page loads the fewer resources it uses.
• Application reliability and scalability - the more stable the application, the less total direct and indirect usage it generates
• Lower cost of maintenance - the least amount of code principle and alignment with industry development standards make our code maintainable in the long run.
• Reduction of internal operating costs - our solutions are built with a focus on content author and marketer productivity. The easier it is for them to perform their job, the less time they will spend doing it - the less energy the task will take.
• Composable architecture - scalability, extensibility, and general flexibility of a martech solution helps avoid costly rebuilds down the road and instead - evolves and grows with your company. The fewer rebuilds we have to do - the less energy our solution will use over its lifetime.
• SEO - fast page loading speed and compliance with core vitals as a result helps boost the web pages of our clients in search results.
• Increased security - application availability, similar to reliability - has a direct impact on its energy consumption. We build secure solutions that not only help reduce the energy footprint, but also keep our clients secure.

Why did you choose to focus on green development?

Our company consists of senior people and experts who treat development as a craft and a means of achieving higher goals. As experts in our field, we feel it is upon us to take the first step towards sustainable digital development. We do it for our clients and we do it for our families and communities.