Look at the average size of a software computer code just twenty years ago and the size of a file today, and you’ll be astounded by the difference. This is because computing processing, open-source libraries, and frameworks alike have expanded what coders can do. Sometimes, it can feel like the sky's the limit for these coders.
Our computers are consistently becoming more powerful, but along with this power comes responsibility.
Otherwise, our environment suffers the consequences.
This is because the chips needed to power these powerful new tools (here’s looking to you, AI) require substantial energy demands. For example, have a look at the next generation of AI accelerators:
The extra power consumption isn’t without a huge boost in processing power, yes, but that doesn’t change the fact that AI’s energy use is estimated to make up 2 to 3% of the world’s total global emissions.
In short, the energy demands of data centers are soaring, largely due to the huge amount of data needed to power AI.
It’s estimated that, to sustain AI’s growth, the computational power needed has to double every 100 days.
While there is hope that AI can be used to help curb electricity use and carbon emissions elsewhere, that doesn't mean that AI development and coding itself can or should go unchecked. This is where green coding comes into play.
What Is Green Coding?
Green coding is a sustainability initiative that focuses on minimizing the amount of energy needed to process your code. It’s essential to meet greenhouse emission reduction goals, reduce energy consumption (and costs) and to optimize systems as a whole.
Green coding can be as simple as optimizing multimodal embeddings so that they work smoothly and efficiently, and, as a result, require less energy to run.
It can also be as in-depth as reworking and optimizing an entire code to make it as clean as possible, with minimal redirects or unnecessary computational tasks involved. Green coding can also include:
Improved resource management
Minimizing e-waste
Applying regular updates to avoid the use of outdated, less efficient software
Code minification
Since green coding is an approach to coding rather than a specific coding language, you can become a green coder through multiple methods. You can work on sprucing up your coding practice, for example, or you can take an Ironhack Data Analytics Bootcamp so that you can learn how to use data more efficiently.
Why Is Green Coding Important for Your Business?
Companies must invest in green coding to meet their Environmental, Social, and Governance goals. Bringing on more specialists, or, alternatively, adding green coding to your skillset, in particular, can help you bring down your organization’s carbon footprint.
But what is the relevance of these ESG goals?
These companies publicly assess these goals in relation to the World Economic Forum metrics to comply with ESG reporting requirements. Although this reporting is largely voluntary, it is a must for businesses that want to compete in a world where every organization’s role in society as a whole is already being closely examined.
Investing in green coding doesn’t just help you meet your ESG goals. It’s also an excellent way to bolster your brand’s reputation. Remember, we live in a world where people expect organizations to be more socially responsible. In an EU study, for example, 73% of respondents claim that a product’s environmental impact is a factor they consider when purchasing.
Invest in green coding, and you can use those initiatives to help build an eco-friendly brand image that can help you stand out from the competition. This can appeal better to consumers and other businesses alike.
There are financial benefits for you, too. Investing in green coding for your business helps you save on operational costs. The less energy is needed to run your system, the lower the cost to run your business.
How to Get Started with Green Coding
Ready to reap those green coding benefits? Follow these green coding best practices:
Track Your Carbon Footprint
You won’t know what needs to be done to reduce your carbon footprint if you don’t know where you stand. So, leverage tools like Azure Emissions Dashboard or AWS Carbon Footprint in your projects. They can help you track and understand the environmental impact of your coding so you can make adjustments if necessary.
Be Lean with Your Code
For many programmers, building software that uses all available processing power is the go-to rule of thumb. The thought here is that the computers using it will have advanced by the time the software in question hits the market.
But green coding avoids this bloatware approach. Instead, you’ll want to look into lean coding, which borrows from lean manufacturing principles to help eliminate wasteful code and maximize efficiency to deliver high-quality, high-impact software.
This is done by:
Being transparent in development goals and scope to minimize production time
Identifying unnecessary steps, tasks, or tools in the code to streamline operation
Starting small and building up to catch bugs and errors
Frequently reviewing your code. If your project is relatively simple, you can use a code formatter like Prettier to ensure lean coding.
Using continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines are used to automate testing and deployment and reduce the time (and the electricity needed) needed to get the software to market.
These are just a few lean coding principles you can consider. How you cut down on your code specifically will depend on the project and resources you have available.
Implement Coding Guidelines
If multiple people have worked on your coding projects without strict guidelines or coding conventions, then chances are they are inefficient and even unmanageable. This is the exact sort of project that’s taking more energy to run than needed.
So, implement strict coding guidelines that ensure lean coding throughout your modern software development projects.
Here are some rules you might want to consider asking team members to follow:
Write as few lines as possible.
Don’t use lengthy functions. A single function should execute a task.
Use the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle.
With strict coding guidelines being followed by everyone, you can maintain clean and lean coding over time.
Improve Your Data Structures
AI, LLMS, and machine learning require extensive data structures. This is particularly true as systems like retrieval augmentation generation (RAG) are added to enhance them.
In order for any of these systems to work efficiently and quickly, the data they have access to must be fully optimized and organized. You can do this by:
Centralizing data: Centralizing data into a data warehouse from all available sources will reduce the time and processing power needed to access available information.
Clean data: Remove any inaccurate, duplicate, or outdated files from the database or data warehouse.
Limit data: If the AI or LLM is being used for a specific purpose (like a customer service chatbot), then limit or tailor the domains or topics it has access to.
Structure the data: Make it a breeze for your LLMs to process and retrieve data by structuring it into a format like JSON or CSV.
Add metadata: Mark up your data with tags, keywords, or categories to make it faster and easier to search and filter.
Optimize data embeddings: Choose an embedding model like BERT or RoBERTa to help link data more quickly.
These are, of course, just a few ways to improve your data structures and your system’s ability to retrieve and use them. When the data itself is clean-cut and fully marked up, it takes less power, less time, and fewer mistakes to get results.
Ultimately, it requires less energy and generates a smaller carbon footprint, making it a practical step toward successful green coding.
Improve Energy Efficiency of the Hardware
One of the easiest and most effective ways to make any code greener is to improve the hardware on which it’s running.
What you can do will depend entirely on how much control you have over the hardware in question. For example, you can:
Switch to a renewable energy provider
Upgrade hardware to a more efficient model (and recycle the e-waste)
Activate all energy-saving features on computers, servers, and accessories
Invest in a water recapture system if you have a data center
Add these initiatives to your wider sustainability framework, and you’ll be well on your way to, not just implementing green coding practices, but also reducing your company’s carbon footprint overall.
Key Takeaways
Businesses that want to be more socially responsible and build trust with stakeholders at the same time need to adopt green coding.
The good news is, as a business, you can adopt green coding initiatives in several ways. From tracking your carbon footprint and making the necessary adjustments to implementing strict coding guidelines and enhancing your data structures, there are many ways you can incorporate green coding practices in modern software development.
Ready to start your green coding journey? Begin by learning all the basic skills you need–from coding to AI and data management—in an Ironhack AI Bootcamp!
Bio:
Cohere
Cohere is a leading enterprise AI platform. We build enterprise-grade frontier AI models and products designed to solve real-world business challenges. Our products are cloud-agnostic to meet companies wherever their data is stored and offer the highest levels of security, privacy, and customization with on-premises and private cloud deployment options.
