Sometimes the simplest things are so hard for people to come up with. Unfortunately, people are trying to make their life more difficult than it needs to be --

Sometimes the simplest things are so hard for people to come up with. Unfortunately, people are trying to make their life more difficult than it needs to be -- I think developers are especially prone to trying to figure out their own solution rather than spending a moment to search for it. All contact with outside world should happen through interfaces with replaceable implementation. If you care about time related stuff, this should also include time, timers, schedulers, etc. Make sure you don't circumvent the interfaces by accident. There are stupid ways to do so like getting current time in SQL or embedding current time in new objects by default.