Programmer Humor

I'm ok with timezones, but the guy who invented daylight savings time I'd slap to all the way to the sun

Worked on a project where devices just magically froze, but only during the month of February!

Turned out the people who had written the firmware had decided to do their own time math to save space and had put in an exception in the code for leap year values. Except instead of February 29th, it kicked in for the whole month. And the math was wrong so you ended up with negative values.

The product was due for launch in March of that year and was headed to manufacturing. It was by sheer luck that someone ran a test on February 1st and caught the problem.

Don't mess with time in code, kids.

The UK press every year makes a huge song and dance in opinion pieces about getting rid of DST. However I'm always horrified to see that people want us to keep British Summer Time instead of Grenwich Mean Time. I understand that there are "longer evenings" in BST; however we literally invented GMT and coerced the rest of the world to adjust their times based on that. From the point of view of being constantly compatible with UTC and having more consistent business hours for international companies it makes more sense to me if we kept GMT.

Also the longer evenings thing can be achieved by simply staying up an hour later. It's not exactly like an hour is being stolen from you when the times switch, the change of clocks are mainly pointless admin.

Lastly I read an article recently that described a correlation between the incidence of heart attacks and the clocks changing. The theory is that just slightly messing with people's sleeping patterns can cause additional strain on the body.

But if time travel is a thing, imagine the whole new time nightmares! Oh you went back a year with your phone? Now all your TLS root certs are invalid because you're before the start date. Or you have files/emails/whatever that are dated in the future. I guess you can get to that state by just setting your clock forward but I imagine some stuff would break.

I feel you're conflating TimeZones with ever-changing Daylight Savings time rules.

Cool, so sunrise is at 8 PM now. Or maybe there's just no consistent relationship between what a clock on the East and West coast of America say, and a call can't be scheduled between them.

The real problem with time and date is that it has to fit social and natural systems as well as actual passage of time. A lot of nuance is unavoidable.

I've just said 'fuck it' and switched all my clocks to UTC. I don't even care anymore.

The guy that invented time zones was solving a problem where each little town had their own time standard. I don't think that was sustainable.

I used to feel this way. Over the course of building out 2 calendar systems in my career (so far) and having to learn the intricacies of date and time-related data types and how they interact with time zones, I don’t have much disdain for time zones. I’d suggest for anyone who feels the same way as this meme read So You Want To Abolish Time Zones.

Also, programmers tend to get frustrated with time zones when they run into bugs around time zone conversion. This is almost always due to the code being written in a way that disregards the existence of times zones until it’s needed and then tacks on the time zone handling as an afterthought.

If any code that deals with time takes the full complexities of time zones into account from the get-go (which isn’t that hard to do), then it’s pretty straightforward to manage.

Soon we're going to have a new timezone for the moon. Yay, I guess?