How To Make Web More Sustainable? – Chat with Thibaud Colas

Behind the Commit

In this episode, I’m chatting with Thibaud Colas — Product Lead & Engineering Manager at Torchbox, Wagtail product lead, and current President of the Django Software Foundation. We talk about digital sustainability: why the internet’s energy use matters, how to measure it, why performance is important for emissions, whether rewriting everything in Rust is the only solution, and why we should keep AI businesses more accountable.

Outline

0:00 — Episode highlights

0:58 — Guest intro

1:21 — Is carbon footprint a popular topic among developers?

3:44 — What’s the carbon impact of the web and software in general?

5:35 — How can we measure a website’s carbon footprint?

8:26 — What are Django’s and Wagtail’s plans to reduce their footprint?

9:35 — Does the programming language we use (e.g., Python or Rust) make a difference?

11:42 — What practical steps can developers take to lower their software’s impact?

12:25 — How do we raise awareness and make sustainability a mainstream topic in tech?

15:34 — Should businesses be accountable for their software’s footprint?

16:59 — What should AI companies and cloud providers be more transparent about?

Episode links

– Sustainable Web Design (methodology): https://sustainablewebdesign.org/

– Wagtail CMS (Torchbox): https://wagtail.org/

– Django Software Foundation: https://www.djangoproject.com/foundation/

– Climate Action Tech community: https://climateaction.tech/

– W3C work on web sustainability: https://w3c.github.io/sustainableweb-wsg/