There are many better written guides available online than the ones that were here so I have decided to distill all the important bits into the points below:
Enable any strict modes or warnings that are available
To improve memory safety and program correctness, maybe use a language like C#, Go, Java or Rust instead that are stricter and safer by default?
Click here to read more!
Save the planet 🌎 (and maybe 💲 too!)
The study "Energy Efficiency Across Programming Languages" showed that in the tests they performed, scripting languages such as
Python and Perl did very badly. Moving to any of the safe languages mentioned above will likely speed up the task, make the program easier
to maintain, reduce costs and lower your carbon / energy foot print.
Click here to read more!
Try to use only one language
By using the minimalist approach of using fewer programming languages (ideally just the one), you reduce the number of compilers you need to keep up to date and lanugages you need to be familiar with.
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Bandwidth is not free, try compressing with 7-Zip
Offer 7-Zip archives as well as zip, they can be much smaller in size (around a third) making
for faster downloads.
Smaller image files means less space used and faster websites
Run any PNG image files through OptiPNG (or a similar optimizer). Consider using Google's WebP format if it is suitable.
Think about your dependencies
For example, does your program really need an SQL installation? Would a simple CSV file do the job?
Better offline documentation
A PDF document is much better than an offline website, a PDF is usually much smaller and is easier to search.
Move from .NET Framework to .NET Core/6+
A specific point but for some C# projects, this may just be a simple recompile using the .NET Core/6 compiler to get a faster and more memory efficient program.
All simple steps but together can help make software and the web better!
This a single PDF which contains and replaced many of the guides which were this site, it also has more details about the above points.
Download now! (183k PDF)
Updated! (20/03/23)