Go and green tech - how do you use Go to save the environment?

Community
#1

Hi fellow Gophers,

Recently, I was thinking about the biggest challenge for the global society—climate change—and I started wondering what we, as Go Developers, Specialists, Teachers, etc., can do to help stop global warming.

(Side note: if you disagree about the scientific evidence of a human-made climate change that endangers the planet, please skip this post, and refrain from commenting here. This is a purely technical post. I don’t mean to spawn any political or ideological discussions.)

To keep it short, I am curious to learn how Go developers, or Go teams, use Go to help save the environment.

For example,

  • Did you or your company shift recently from a scripting language to Go to reduce their carbon footprint? Did the transformation work as expected?
  • Are you employing Go for writing Green Software?
  • Are you using Go for any projects that help address environmental problems?

If so, please share your experience!

Also, if you want to share some ideas about how Go might help reduce the carbon footprint, save water, support renewable energies, etc., feel free to post them here.

Thank you!

generictree_sm

#2

By accident I found that web speed gives the major impact on saving the environment when creating web sites. Almost any site of mine driven by Go reduces the carbon impact. According to https://ecograder.com

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#3

Awesome, thanks for sharing, @Sibert. I did not know of Ecograder yet.

This seems to go in a similar direction as the Website Carbon Calculator.

Funny aside: for a test, I recently added the calculator to appliedgo.net and discovered that the article pages were producing twice the CO2 than other pages. It turned out that Disqus is the culprit.
(If anybody knows an energy-efficient Disqus alternative, let me know.)

It would be interesting to know how far Go as a backend language can help reduce CO2 emissions for websites. Seems that your site is a great starting point to help speed up websites and reduce the carbon footprint!

#4

This “app” is fetching a hundred of rows from a Go REST API (using Postgresql). So far less impact on the environment. https://crud.go4webdev.org

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#5

At my employer we develop software for renewable power company clients, and we also write code in Go (albeit among other languages). I don’t personally work on the products for those clients.

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#6

Hi,
although its not Go yet and a dodgy prototype I wrote a community heating management system in Ada 2012 and using the distributed system annex personality with polyorb. Now we have Golang I am keen to convert it to golang once I have apis to zwave and zigbee etc. The thing about fuel poverty is there are two issues.

  1. A lack of money
  2. A lack of ability to use heating controls.
    Also I was making use of a couple of stats 49 percent of UK energy is used in heating housing.
    30 per cent of energy can be saved by zoning houses.
    The prototype you can see is at github.com/tonygair/kushtibot I really want to start again in Go though. I’m still learning with that german phrase in mind …learn through trying!