Sustainable Web Dev

After much deliberation, I’m doubling down on the sustainable web development niche. It’s something I’ve only started writing about 10 months ago, but the idea I’ve been with me ever since I became a digital nomad more than two years ago.

Technology and its usage have always fascinated me, even more so since I graduated from engineering school. I started with simple PHP/JQuery apps, then learned about Symfony, React, NodeJS, Gatsby, Next, MongoDB, and progressive web apps. 

To me, the path is clear: the web development industry is bound to shift toward the most efficient tech stacks, costing less to develop with and maintain while driving better user experiences and thus higher revenues. NoCode will become prominent, and for all the rest developers will use more advanced architectures blurring the line between frontend, backend, and platforms.

And that’s where sustainable web architectures will come into play, with things like universal web applications, offline-first, real-time collaboration, and green ITC.

In order to take on this challenge, I’ve completely reinvented my tech stack: CouchDb/PouchDb for replicated databases, ExpressJS and Caddy as programmable web servers, SvelteJS to build lightning-fast web interfaces, and NodeJS to act as a controller. I’m leveraging service workers, web assembly, and static page generation heavily, without losing control, flexibility, and development speed.

My new writing app, Writing Startup, will act as a proof of concept. It’s planned to release in January 2021, and from there I’ll start providing new services as a sustainable web developer. The domain name sustainablewebdev.com has already been bought and is ready to use. But not today, today it’s time to document my research results!