GreenCoding: taking coding back to basics

To meet the UK government’s lofty net zero ambitions, businesses and individuals alike will need to play their part in reducing the greenhouse emissions we all produce. As a result, organisations of all sizes are increasingly investing in improving their sustainability credentials. Data from Lloyds Banking Group finds more than half (54%) of UK SMEs say becoming more environmentally sustainable is important to their business.

Wider sustainability initiatives must now consider ‘green IT’ and how companies can reduce their overall energy usage. Data centres are at the core of IT infrastructure and currently require huge amounts of energy to run; whilst there is no real alternative to having data centres, businesses need to consider ways to make such systems more sustainable. By making the data which feeds into these centres more ‘green’ and reducing the amount of code that is needed to process it, businesses can have a positive impact on reducing energy usage and making the entire process more efficient.

Coding may not automatically be considered ‘when thinking of practices or processes which can help to reduce the environmental impact of data centres. However, inefficient code and the energy use in data centres is having a significant impact on the environment, as capacity and usage of digital technology continues to increase.

In an effort to mitigate these effects, GFT is championing a greener way of coding and introducing company-wide training at all levels to focus on green topics and how to code more sustainably. Coding frameworks also come into this, with the benefit of such schemes being that more people are upskilled in coding quickly, and are able to utilise pre-defined best practice green code.  This means more people can acquire the required skills for ‘green coding’ best practice faster, creating accelerated innovation and time-to-market.

GreenCoding is a lot less complex than might be anticipated, since it is simply a return to good coding practice which has arguably been forgotten over recent years due to the massive improvements witnessed in cloud and storage capacity. These improvements  have meant code is written quickly to respond to demand, with little thought of the efficiency of the processes.

Previously, when data storage was more limited, code would often need to be simplified and streamlined to save storage space once it was written, with unnecessary lines of code being removed and every line of code being scrutinised and cleaned up. However, as data centres have grown with what seems a limitless capacity for data, this previous best practice has been bypassed to speed the process up. Although this approach was initially driven by performance with little thought for efficiency, a green focus is now essential to support the sustainable future of technology.

GFT has pioneered a programme of GreenCoding training and has set a target to train 95% of all staff with GreenCoding accreditations in the UK by the end of 2022. As part of this sustainability drive, there is also a desire to implement GreenCoding as mandatory onboarding training for all new recruits, to ensure the next generation of GFT coders build good practice early on.

As recent developments in cloud adoption prove, implementing such processes is much simpler and more accessible for businesses at the beginning than it is retrospectively. As with any habit, it takes time to break it and replace it. However, when considering the state of the environment and the stark warnings we are now receiving from experts, there’s no time like the present to take action and lead the way for tech adopting more sustainable practices.

The short-term investment in training has long-term benefits both for the businesses, showing how firms can lead the way on important issues and on the environment. For businesses, it is understandable that such issues are assessed against multiple factors including financial viability and time efficiency. Adopting more GreenCoding practices has benefits across the board, as it reduces the data and cloud storage expense and allows for more time to be spent in up-skilling staff in more green tech practices.

GFT is now seeing the top cloud providers taking steps towards implementing GreenCoding best practice.

The future is bright, the future is green!

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