Most cloud sustainability tools are built for sustainability officers. They pull three-month-old billing data, run it through a proprietary model, and produce a PDF that engineers never see. By the time you know your us-east-1 cluster emits twice as much as us-west-2 would have, it's been running for a quarter. The architecture is locked in. The carbon is already burnt. The only moment you can act
There's a moment every developer knows. You need to generate a PDF. It looks simple. You've done harder things. Three hours later, you're reading a Stack Overflow thread from 2016 that ends with "works on my machine." This post is about that moment — the actual options, what breaks in each, and where I landed after years of hitting this in production. It uses a stripped-down WebKit engine and conv