DEV Community: Coby Kalter

🌍 5+ APIs Developers Can Use to Celebrate Earth Day 2025

Coby Kalter — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 21:59:10 +0000

A year ago today—on Earth Day 2024—I published my first Dev.to post. Inspired by a mentor who encouraged me to blend my passions for tech and sustainability, I wrote 5 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day as a Developer. That post unexpectedly took off, landing in the Top 7 of the week and reaching hundreds of readers in just a few days.

So this year, I thought—why not make this a tradition?

For Earth Day 2025, I wanted to offer developers another way to flex their skills for the planet. And what better way than with a tool we all know and love: APIs.

Below are 5+ APIs you can use to build greener applications, understand your digital footprint, or simply explore sustainability data. Whether you’re building something new or improving an existing project, these APIs can help align your work with environmental impact.

🌱 1. The Green Web Foundation APIs

The internet runs on servers—and servers run on energy. In fact, the average server consumes around 250 megawatt-hours annually, the equivalent of powering 23 U.S. households. Collectively, data centers account for roughly 3% of global electricity use and 2% of CO₂ emissions.

The Green Web Foundation aims to change that by promoting a fossil-free internet. Their tools and APIs help you:

✅ Check if a domain is hosted by a green provider with the Green Web Check API
✅ Measure the CO₂ intensity of IP activity with the IP to CO2 Intensity API
✅ Browse their Hosting Provider Directory to find greener server options

🔗 Learn more: The Green Web Foundation

☁️ 2. Cloud for Sustainability API by Microsoft

Cooling data centers accounts for up to 40% of their total energy use. When you're working with cloud-based systems, the impact multiplies.

Microsoft's Cloud for Sustainability API helps Azure developers understand and manage the carbon emissions linked to their Microsoft Cloud usage—including Azure, Microsoft 365, and Power BI.

This API is part of Microsoft’s broader ESG platform, which provides centralized tools to track and meet sustainability goals across an organization. Perfect for enterprise teams fully committed to the MS Cloud ecosystem.

💡 Bonus: AWS and Google Cloud also offer sustainability tools, though they tend to be more custom-fit and less API-driven.

🏗️ 3. 2050 Materials API

The built environment—everything we construct and maintain—contributes a staggering 40% of global carbon emissions. That’s where 2050 Materials comes in.

Their API provides access to a growing database of building materials, along with sustainability data for each product. Construction teams can use this API to:

Compare materials based on carbon footprint
Align material sourcing with net-zero targets
Make climate-conscious decisions from the design stage onward

It’s a perfect tool for developers working in architecture, real estate tech, or supply chain software for construction.

🚶 4. Walk Score API

Transportation is one of the most emissions-heavy sectors—cars and vans alone make up about 10% of global CO₂ emissions.

The Walk Score API lets you tap into walkability, bikeability, and public transit data for different neighborhoods and cities. Use it to:

Promote low-carbon commuting options
Build location-aware apps that prioritize accessibility
Help users make sustainable housing decisions

It includes Walk Score, Bike Score, Transit Score, and even Travel Time analysis. A great fit for mobility apps, real estate platforms, or community dashboards.

☀️ 5. Google Maps Environment APIs

Google Maps isn’t just for navigation—it also offers several APIs geared toward sustainability:

Infrastructure:

☀️ Solar API: Analyze rooftops and estimate solar energy potential

Environmental Awareness:

🌫️ Air Quality API
🌾 Pollen API
☁️ Weather API

These tools are ideal for developers working on climate adaptation, real-time weather alerts, or even wellness apps that consider local air and pollen levels.

🔗 Learn more: Google Maps Environment APIs

🌎 Wrapping Up

Whether you're working on a side project, contributing to open source, or leading a team at an enterprise, these APIs offer concrete ways to build with the Earth in mind. Sustainability is a systems problem—but developers are some of the best systems thinkers out there.

Let’s code a greener future, one API at a time.

Have a favorite sustainability-related API I missed? Drop it in the comments—I’d love to keep expanding this list!

Happy Earth Day 💚

New Goals, New Me: Compiling 2025

Coby Kalter — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 04:52:34 +0000

This is a submission for the 2025 New Year Writing challenge: Compiling 2025.

At the end of 2024, I was listening a lot to Kendrick Lamar’s latest album GNX. One song that I think is brilliant is “Reincarnated”. In the song, Kendrick tells the life stories of two musical artists that have inspired his journey as an artist - John Lee Hooker and Billie Holiday. Through these stories, he shares his own journey as a reincarnated version of both artists, their life lessons becoming his own and guiding him toward success. This telling of reincarnation has resonated with me as I navigate a career switch. I think in order to make pivotal changes in our life we are often forced to reinvent ourselves. It’s through this lens that I approach my roadmap for 2025.

Much like in “Reincarnated”, I cannot plan for the future without acknowledging the challenges and lessons of the past. My 2024 coding journey was one of ups and downs: I completed Skillcrush’s Full Stack Development program, I built my first full stack CRUD app, and I built on my learning of Python for frontend development (with Flask) to use it for data analysis, data visualizations, and backend development using a SQLite database. While I had accomplished so much within the first half of the year, I also started looking for opportunities to use my new skillset professionally, which after being rejected or ghosted over 100 times, I felt pretty burned out by the end of 2024.

So now, with 2024 behind me and 2025 in clear view, I am ready to continue to working towards this end goal but with a different approach. In doing so, I don’t want to lose sight of why I decided to become a developer in the first place. Therefore, by making the following goals a habit that will continue throughout my dev career, I hope they can lead to me meeting my end goal:

1. Become a Better Developer:
What is a better developer? After spending the last few years learning the fundamentals—including programming languages, frontend-backend interactions, and server communication—I feel confident in my grasp of these core concepts. However, to me what being a better developer means is not necessarily knowing how to code something (there’s always documentation for that 😃), it’s understanding how to put the various pieces of a site or app together. It’s knowing which components and frameworks to choose from and how they work together to provide a good user experience. It’s deciding when to use one UI component or framework over another. It’s also making decisions on what tools to use to improve site performance and data rendering.

Part of making better decisions is knowing what tools are out there. Tech is constantly changing, there are always new frameworks, libraries, or site generators on the market. There will always be folks in the industry telling you what to build with and why. All of this comes with noise and the overwhelming reality that you’ll never know it all. Which is not my aim, my aim is to simply have an understanding of what’s out there, so that when I hit a unique problem I know where to look for potential solutions. After all being a developer means knowing how to solve problems.

Being a developer also means constantly learning, not only about the tools that are out there, but it also means learning aspects of development you may not be as comfortable with. Therefore in 2025, I am committing to working on more projects to help me build the reflexes to solve problems quicker, learn tools I haven’t used before, and build my web design skills to improve my frontends.

2. Connect With More Developers:
As an introvert, I have found the idea of networking to be daunting. But I know as someone who is trying to transition into this industry, it’s necessary. One thing I learned in 2024, was that I may have been thinking about networking in the wrong way. I was used to the old-fashioned way of networking at an in-person event: where lots of conversations are happening simultaneously, time is limited, and your elevator pitch is the only thing you have to get someone’s attention. While those opportunities still exist and are widely available, it hasn’t been an environment that has necessarily worked well for me. But networking also has moved online, and as devs, we spend a lot of our time online. Therefore, I plan to use more online networks to connect with devs across the globe.

I'm eager to learn from other developers about their experiences in the field: How did they get their start? What drives their personal goals? What are they building, and which tools do they prefer? Though we work in a technical field, we're all human at our core. By connecting with one another, we can keep this humanity at the forefront of our work. After all, technology exists to enhance the human experience—something we can only achieve by embracing our own humanity.

In order to connect with devs, I am committing to being more active in dev-centric networks, some skill-focused (ie. frontend), others more mission-focused (ie. ClimateTech). By being more engaged, I hope to set up calls a few times a month and showcase what I’ve been working on. This brings me to my last goal…

3. Build In Public:
In 2024, I realized that there are many of us developers, and we’re all competing for the same attention, gigs, and jobs. This makes it harder for us to stand out and let our unique attributes shine. So many devs know how to build an app with React for example, but what makes that skill unique for each dev is what else they’re bringing to the table. This is why in 2025, I plan to build more in public. So anytime I am working on a large project or contributing to open source, I plan to post about it. Discussing what the goal was, what problems I came across, and how I solved them. Through this medium I hope my unique approach to web dev shines through.

Building in public is also a great way to work on my first two goals. It’ll help me practice my skills and get feedback from other devs on how they may have approached the problems I faced. It’ll also help me connect with more devs and even potentially become an opportunity for collaboration.

If my 2024 was all about learning and understanding the tech landscape and its opportunities. Then my 2025 is all about refining what I have learned and trying new approaches to navigating this industry. But this year is also an opportunity for me to plan better because I know what hasn’t been working for me in balancing every aspect of my life. This means consistently setting weekly goals, scheduling time to work on tasks, celebrating the small wins, and having grace for myself when I can’t get to something. It also means finding better ways to manage all of these things and check in with myself.

So, to set a clear 2025 roadmap, I will summarize my goals here:

Overarching Intentions:

Become a Better Developer
Connect with More Devs
Build in Public

SMART Goals - Each of these goals below will help to address the overarching intentions:

Sidenote: If you’re not familiar with SMART goals they’re: Specific Measurable Achievable Relevant Time-bound

Build at least 2-3 projects (professional or personal) by end of year
- Each project should have a unique, user-friendly, and well-thought-out design (aka. wireframes, design files with a color palette and a typescale etc.)
Engage with 1-2 developers per month
Post at least 1-2x a month via Dev and/or LinkedIn

Sub-Goals - These are goals I would like to achieve but will be accomplished through working on the SMART goals above:

Improve Time Management
Continue learning through practice, conversation, and reading
Build public trust in my dev skills

I look forward to working on these goals and to see what opportunities come from accomplishing them. Here’s to a productive 2025 🥂!

If you have similar goals, have found ways to streamline your time management, or have any thoughts on my 2025 roadmap, I would love to hear about it in the comments.

Getting Git to Work on Apple Silicon

Coby Kalter — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 22:36:16 +0000

I recently upgraded from a MacBook Pro 2017 with an Intel i7 processor to a MacBook Air 2023 with Apple’s M3 processor. Little did I know that making this switch would trigger issues with the apps I used on my Intel-based laptop. I quickly learned that most applications are developed to work on Intel chips (Intel app) and not always on Apple Silicon (Universal app), a newer processor first released in 2020. This incompatibility also affected the development environment I was used to working with on my older MacBook Pro. My main issues were getting Git to run in my terminal properly and then getting GitHub synced up to my new MacBook. I also had trouble finding the exact solution to my problem in the usual troubleshooting forums so I am providing the steps I took to remedy this here:

1. Git Commands Showing Error in the Terminal

After migrating my data from my old MacBook to my new one using Migration Assistant, I wanted to verify that everything was migrated properly and that my new computer was set up for my usual workflow. I decided to open a local test repo for which I have a corresponding repo in GitHub. After editing the html file with minor changes I tried committing the changes using the git status and git commit commands. For every git command I entered into the terminal, I got the following error:

2. Identifying the Problem

I looked up what this error message meant and I gathered that there was something about where and how Git was installed on my new MacBook that was not properly formatted for my Apple Silicon-based computer.

3. Reinstalling Git via Xcode Command Line Tools

From what I read, it seemed like maybe reinstalling Git which is bundled with Apple’s Xcode Command Line Tools may fix the solution. This would, not only potentially switch the software to an Apple Silicon compatible version, but would also update it to its latest version. I signed into the Apple Developer site and downloaded and installed the latest version of Command Line Tools. I then tried committing my changes and again I received the same Git error.

4. Installing Rosetta 2

The next two potential solutions I identified from different threads and Google AI were to either uninstall Git and then reinstall it, which would require me to uninstall Xcode Command Line Tools and then reinstall it. OR try installing Rosetta 2 which translates apps with x86_64 (aka Intel specific) instructions to work on Apple Silicon. (This is all a bit out of scope from my expertise in web-based development, so I took this as a learning moment - The More You Know!⭐).

I decided to try Rosetta 2 first because I figured it may prove to be the quickest solution if it works and because there was no easy uninstall option for XCode Command Line Tools. After a successful install, I retried submitting some git commands, and SUCCESS! I was able to add changes to the queue and commit those changes. But then I hit another snag, I was unable to push those changes to GitHub.

5. Getting GitHub Connected via SSH

I started receiving an authentication error stating my GitHub username and password were invalid. So I thought that maybe my SSH connection with GitHub was changed due to the migration so I followed the steps to re-establish it. This resulted in the command line telling me that the repo was already connected.

I then looked into other authentication issues I may have been experiencing and it turns out that my Personal Access Token was expired. So I created a new one, originally with HTTPS but this didn’t seem to work and I realized this was the recommended step if you’re developing APIs which I am not for most of my personal projects. So then I deleted that token and created another one via SSH. And Voila! I was able to sign in and push my changes to the GitHub repo.

6. Reauthorizing GitHub to work with VS Code

I then tested out some code changes in VS Code and I noticed that some of the icons I usually see in VS Code that notify a user of version control modifications were not displaying. I also looked at the GitHub extension and saw that I was no longer seeing any issues from an open-source project I have been working on. I figured out that while other authentications migrated to my new MacBook my GitHub account connection with VS Code did not. So I re-established my connection by signing in on VS Code and started to see all the issues from the open-source repo. I then refreshed the app and noticed that the icons like 'M' for modified were now displayed next to the updated file.

So after all these steps, I was eventually able to get my usual dev setup working like I like it to. I hope this can serve as a quick guide for anyone who may have experienced similar issues when upgrading their MacBook from an Intel chip to one with an M chip. While these hiccups did occur when transitioning over, overall I am generally happy with my new MacBook. It’s quick and can handle a lot of processing at once. Looking forward to developing more on this new machine.

If you're a Mac user, have you had any issues upgrading to Apple Silicon? Or are there other methods I should have considered? Let me know in the comments.

Glam Up My Markup: Earth Day - Frontend Challenge Submission

Coby Kalter — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 05:16:32 +0000

This is a submission for Frontend Challenge v24.04.17, Glam Up My Markup: Earth Day Celebration Landing Page

What I Built

My landing page submission spreads out the content from the source HTML to provide a smooth scrolling experience. Each section of content is then easier to focus on. The landing page has a dark theme to conserve energy and features an animated earth and links to resources. I strictly followed the prompt and only added to the source HTML code by using JavaScript.

Demo

Here's the DEMO.

Here’s the CODE.

Journey

I wanted to use this challenge to practice my CSS and JavaScript skills and learn new things. I focused on using minimal design, smooth scrolling, and animations. I hoped to learn some CSS animation in the process which I did. I had a lot of design inspiration from the GitHub Universe site. There were a few more ideas I had that I would have liked to try out, but some items took longer than expected. Ultimately, I am happy with my end product and plan to keep iterating on this landing page in the future.

5 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day as a Developer 🌎🌏🌍

Coby Kalter — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 17:41:05 +0000

Fifty-four years ago today, the first Earth Day was celebrated, signaling the start of a global environmental movement. Since then we’ve come a long way in environmental sustainability and technology. Of course, with significant concerns like climate change, deforestation, plastic pollution, etc. we also still have a long way to go.

As developers, we can play our part in supporting environmental causes. Whether it’s creating new tech products that support scientists with research, helping companies to become more sustainable, developing citizen science projects, or creating a webpage that brings attention to a certain issue, we have skills that can be used for Earth’s benefit.

So to celebrate Earth, our only home, I’m sharing five ways that developers can celebrate Earth Day:

1. Participate in DEV’s Earth Day Frontend Challenge

As the inspiration for this post and likely one of the first things you’ll see when logging into DEV, this needed to be mentioned first. In honor of Earth Day, DEV is hosting a Frontend Challenge this week. There are two projects that you can submit. One is creating a piece of CSS art inspired by Earth Day and the other is an Earth Day landing page with JavaScript and CSS. Make sure to submit by April 28th. Have fun! Thanks, DEV Team! @thepracticaldev

2. Contribute to Sustainable Open Source Projects

With the explosion of ClimateTech over the last several years and tech being broadly applied to create a more sustainable world, there are many open-source projects developers can contribute to.

GitHub has a list called For Good First Issue which features repositories that help to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals(SDG). The SDGs are a set of goals mutually decided on by UN member nations, that aim to make our world more sustainable - environmentally, socially, and economically. To contribute to one of these open source projects you can filter the list by language base or even the SDG the repo is trying to achieve. Once in a repo, check out its README to learn how to contribute and a list of “Good First Issues” that you can get started on.

ClimateTriage provides another long list of open-source projects that are all environmentally focused. You can contribute to a wide range of projects that are helping to address climate change through sustainable development, energy efficiency, natural resource conservation, and more. You can filter the list by language and sort it by recent issues, the age of the project, or how many downloads or stars it has. Generally, when it comes to open-source code, the more active and the better-rated the repo the more reliable it will be.

3. Use Open Data to Create Climate Data Visualizations

Similar to open source projects there is a wide range of open data available on climate metrics. As a developer, you can use the APIs from these open data sources to create visualizations using your favorite languages and libraries. For example, you may want to use Python’s MatPlotLib library to create a bubble chart of CO2 emissions by country. You can host these visualizations anywhere you publish your code.

A couple of sources for climate-related open data is OpenClimateData.net which is a curated list of sources for open emissions and climate agreements data that are made public by various NGOs and the UN. Another great source for open data is this GitHub repo by Dr. Kasia Kulma, as per her bio a data scientist focused on using data for good. The repo is extensive and not only does it offer open data, but many APIs and open source projects as well. Check out the repo’s README to see the long list of links.

4. Check Your Site's Carbon Emissions

Using the Website Carbon Calculator you can learn how much CO2 emissions your website is responsible for. The API behind this calculator calculates emissions your site and your host site are responsible for. You can even display a badge on your site that shows your site’s emissions through an embed code block. On the site, you can learn more about green hosting and sites that you can host your next site on or switch your current domain to.

5. Utilize Sustainable Web Development Practices

Expanding on the previous number in this list, our websites and apps do have an environmental impact. This is most notable in the energy consumption that impacts both our local grids where we are coding and the grids where our data is stored and our apps are being run. Every time someone makes a request to run an app or site, energy is used to fetch that data from the host server and send it to a local browser or app.

There are methods that we as developers can use when working on projects to limit this run time so that our sites and apps are energy efficient (and have a better UX). Similarly, there are design choices that can achieve the same effect. Some examples are: having clean, easy-to-read code, where each code block serves a purpose; limiting the number of times your site or app has to fetch external data; and making sure to close any asynchronous processes that aren’t needed at every moment your site or app is being used. The list is long and could easily be another post but to learn more you can check out Sustainable Web Design’s guidelines. It offers methods for designers and developers and includes other considerations like hosting and product strategy.

In summary, as developers, we have many options for using our skills to protect and restore our home - Earth. I hope this list provides some inspiration to contribute to open-source projects, build an app of your own, or be mindful of your development decisions. If you know of other great resources feel free to share them in the comments below.

Happy Earth Day!
🌎🌱🌏💧🌍