Zero Degrees Kelvin

It seems fitting that the first post should be about the inspiration for its title.

The physics nerds in the room can skip to the next paragraph. Zero Kelvin (-273.15C), otherwise known as absolute zero, is the coldest possible temperature in the universe. It is also impossible to reach. When you draw heat out of an object it immediately warms the surrounding environment preventing the object from ever reaching 0k. We’ve gotten very, very close … but never quite there.

There are a number of goals in the software industry (and I dare suggest many others) that seem unachievable in the same way. The most purist of goals that for reasons, once in the real world with real life scenarios in play, just become impossible to reach. Proper CI/CD is one that springs to mind. I have yet to see a company that has actually hit this on the head with fully automated software deployments to prod upon merge of a pull request. I’ve seen varying degrees of progress but never have I seen an implementation where I could say job done (or even close to be honest). I’m sure someone’s managed it but I’ve not had the privilege of seeing it.

If we can’t reach it then why bother you say? Well, for a great many things even getting part of the way there is much better than not moving in that direction at all. Even if we can’t get to the absolute goal we can still get a lot of the way there and get significant benefit. I use this when setting seemingly unachievable goals for my teams. This is my absolute zero, lets see how close we can get.