ec0 + lint = ec0lint

Hey ladies, what is the project you're working on? ec0lint, what is it? Let us explain.

Did you know that 250 000 new websites are being published every day? We find it crazy. According to our research, an average website with 10 000 views every month generates 4.6 g of carbon dioxide per view. This sums up to 552 kg of CO2 annually. And this number is valid only for one single website.

Malwina and I learned about digital ecology for the first time during a hackathon. At first, we wanted to work on an app that would teach the users how to establish habits aligned with digital ecology. However, what is the purpose of creating an intensive in emissions app if you can come up with something else instead? We found a website called Sustainable Web Design and learned how much carbon footprint is being generated by web pages. We looked at already existing solutions, but all of them help in optimizing already released websites. “It would be ideal if a frontend developer would know what to improve before the website is published” I said. And this thought ignited an idea in Malwina's mind.

Frontend developers use daily a tool called ESlint. It shows comments that something is missing in the code. For example, it tells you to add a semi-comma. This tool is well-known in the programming world and thus, we used this concept for building our tool.

So, what exactly is ec0lint?

ec0lint is a tool for frontend developers that helps in mitigating the carbon footprint of websites. You can use it already during the coding process to prevent a carbon-heavy web page from publishing. ec0lint advices you on what to change in your code to minimize the size of different components. For example, if you change the font format from TOFF to WOFF you save up to 75% of space. The font will look exactly the same for the end-users, but you'll know. It is all about minimizing the space taken by various elements of the website. In our next article, you'll learn how to precisely calculate the carbon emissions of a website.

Hey, but how many grams of carbon dioxide are we exactly talking about? Thanks to code optimization we can help in reducing CO2 emissions per one view from 4.6 g to ~0.2 g so to only 24 kg CO2 per website annually, saving 529 kg CO2 (-96%!).

We're already dreaming of the near future when we'll optimize the process so that a programmer could by one click change the whole website to its eco-friendly version. And this isn't the end. After we finish ec0lint we want to take a closer look at WordPress and develop a suitable plugin.

We hope that you'll learn a lot from us and that most of you will use ec0lint on a day-to-day basis.