Sustainability
Efficient by default.
Doing things as efficiently as possible saves time and money. It also saves energy. Those goals line up far more often than people expect.
Efficiency is one of the principles behind all of my work. It’s rarely the reason clients call me, but it’s in every recommendation I make, because the cheapest and fastest option is very often the greenest one too.
What that means in practice
- Fewer moving parts. Every service, queue and database that isn’t needed costs money, energy and attention. Simplifying a system is often the biggest saving available.
- Right-sized infrastructure. Servers sized for the load you actually have, and environments that switch off when nobody is using them. See cloud cost reduction.
- Efficient code where it matters. A hot path rewritten in Rust can do the same work on a fraction of the hardware.
- The right place to run. Sometimes that’s the public cloud; sometimes it’s a small, well-run server of your own.
- Automation. Doing a repetitive job once, properly, saves people’s time every day after that.
This website
I’ve tried to practise what I preach here too. This site is plain HTML and CSS, generated in advance by Zola and served from Cloudflare’s network. It uses no JavaScript, sets no cookies, and makes no requests to anyone else’s servers: even the fonts come from this site.