5 ms·

>Since every technical person should know their current UTC difference, Awww, that's so optimistic.

by smackfu 13y ago

elwell 13y ago
Don't forget the ancient proverb handed down to us from the original neckbeards: "At some point in their career, every programmer must pass through the fires of timezone hell."
- munificent 13y ago
  Every programmer must enter those fires, but it's not certain that all of them will survive to emerge from the other side.
- derefr 13y ago
  Timezone hell is, of course, followed up with the three-headed hound of locales, charmaps, and keyboard layouts. And if you pass by that, you drop into the river of cache coherency... (Esoteric software-engineering topics could make a wonderful video game, you know?)
  - ramses0 13y ago
    Turkey Test: http://www.moserware.com/2008/02/does-your-code-pass-turkey-test.html http://www.moserware.com/2008/02/does-your-code-pass-turkey-...
- ericd 13y ago
  I once wrote a scheduling SAAS app, thinking it would be a short, trivial project. It turns out that UTC offsets don't even stay consistent within time zones throughout the year due to differences in daylight savings policy. It took a bit longer than I expected.
  - ams6110 13y ago
    We've probably all been there at one time or another, thinking that "unix timestamps" are all that's needed to represent and perform date/time calculations. Along with the recommendation to never inventing your own cryptography, you should also never write your own date/time routines. Use well tested functions in your database or programming language libraries.
    - ericd 13y ago
      Yeah, I ended up just using Ruby's time functions, but there were still a number of issues despite that (and I don't think they were fully baked).
    - jasey 13y ago
      At my first job I inherited a project from a snr dev who decided to implement his own date logic instead of using the ones provided in .net Anyway come feb 29th 2008 I get a call about some users were having issues. After not to long I figured out it was caused because of the leap year and his logic did not account for leap years. So I called them back and told them it would fix its self by tomorrow. I never actually bothered to fix the bug because a) I thought it was unlikely that the pos system would still be used in 4 years and b) the code was so bad in all areas that trying to fix anything had a good chance of breaking something else. Lets just say that job was very character building
ChuckMcM 13y ago
There was a comment in a piece of code I was looking through once which read, "Except here universal time is actually Pacific Time, maybe they will get the prime meridian moved." Much of the code assumed that all times were in PST and the commenter had apparently been incorporating data sources from other time zones into the code. I thought it was pretty funny.
zanny 13y ago
Except I have the unholy irrational evil daylight savings time in my area and I can't remember when the clocks go forward or backwards so I can't tell when my UTC offset is right or not.
- dolinsky 13y ago
  Fall back - spring ahead
rachellaw 13y ago
GMT is more reliable than UTC, doesn't change with daylight savings. It's also the SI-unit for science methods, so it works internationally.
- thelibrarian 13y ago
  You have that the wrong way around - GMT has daylight savings, UTC does not.
  - deathanatos 13y ago
    UTC most certainly does not have DST. Many people use GMT as a synonym for UTC, and in that sense, it doesn't either. Britain goes to "BST" (British Summer Time) during the summer. From Wikipedia[1]: > Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) originally referred to the mean solar time at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, which later became adopted as a global time standard. It is for the most part the same as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), and when this is viewed as a time zone, the name Greenwich Mean Time is especially used by bodies connected with the United Kingdom, such as the BBC World Service, the Royal Navy, the Met Office and others particularly in Arab countries, such as the Middle East Broadcasting Center and OSN. It is the term in common use in the United Kingdom and countries of the Commonwealth, including Australia, South Africa, India, Pakistan and Malaysia, and many other countries in the Eastern Hemisphere. > Before the introduction of UTC on 1 January 1972, Greenwich Mean Time (also known as Zulu time) was the same as Universal Time (UT), a standard astronomical concept used in many technical fields. > In the United Kingdom, GMT is the official time during winter; during summer British Summer Time (BST) is used. GMT is the same as Western European Time. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMT

>Since every technical person should know their current UTC difference, Awww, that's so optimistic.

by smackfu 13y ago

>Since every technical person should know their current UTC difference, Awww, that's so optimistic.

Don't forget the ancient proverb handed down to us from the original neckbeards: "At some point in their career, every programmer must pass through the fires of timezone hell."

munificent 13y ago
Every programmer must enter those fires, but it's not certain that all of them will survive to emerge from the other side.
derefr 13y ago
Timezone hell is, of course, followed up with the three-headed hound of locales, charmaps, and keyboard layouts. And if you pass by that, you drop into the river of cache coherency... (Esoteric software-engineering topics could make a wonderful video game, you know?)
- ramses0 13y ago
  Turkey Test: http://www.moserware.com/2008/02/does-your-code-pass-turkey-test.html http://www.moserware.com/2008/02/does-your-code-pass-turkey-...
ericd 13y ago
I once wrote a scheduling SAAS app, thinking it would be a short, trivial project. It turns out that UTC offsets don't even stay consistent within time zones throughout the year due to differences in daylight savings policy. It took a bit longer than I expected.
- ams6110 13y ago
  We've probably all been there at one time or another, thinking that "unix timestamps" are all that's needed to represent and perform date/time calculations. Along with the recommendation to never inventing your own cryptography, you should also never write your own date/time routines. Use well tested functions in your database or programming language libraries.
  - ericd 13y ago
    Yeah, I ended up just using Ruby's time functions, but there were still a number of issues despite that (and I don't think they were fully baked).
  - jasey 13y ago
    At my first job I inherited a project from a snr dev who decided to implement his own date logic instead of using the ones provided in .net Anyway come feb 29th 2008 I get a call about some users were having issues. After not to long I figured out it was caused because of the leap year and his logic did not account for leap years. So I called them back and told them it would fix its self by tomorrow. I never actually bothered to fix the bug because a) I thought it was unlikely that the pos system would still be used in 4 years and b) the code was so bad in all areas that trying to fix anything had a good chance of breaking something else. Lets just say that job was very character building

ChuckMcM 13y ago

There was a comment in a piece of code I was looking through once which read, "Except here universal time is actually Pacific Time, maybe they will get the prime meridian moved." Much of the code assumed that all times were in PST and the commenter had apparently been incorporating data sources from other time zones into the code. I thought it was pretty funny.

zanny 13y ago

Except I have the unholy irrational evil daylight savings time in my area and I can't remember when the clocks go forward or backwards so I can't tell when my UTC offset is right or not.

dolinsky 13y ago
Fall back - spring ahead

rachellaw 13y ago

GMT is more reliable than UTC, doesn't change with daylight savings. It's also the SI-unit for science methods, so it works internationally.

thelibrarian 13y ago
You have that the wrong way around - GMT has daylight savings, UTC does not.
- deathanatos 13y ago
  UTC most certainly does not have DST. Many people use GMT as a synonym for UTC, and in that sense, it doesn't either. Britain goes to "BST" (British Summer Time) during the summer. From Wikipedia[1]: > Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) originally referred to the mean solar time at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, which later became adopted as a global time standard. It is for the most part the same as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), and when this is viewed as a time zone, the name Greenwich Mean Time is especially used by bodies connected with the United Kingdom, such as the BBC World Service, the Royal Navy, the Met Office and others particularly in Arab countries, such as the Middle East Broadcasting Center and OSN. It is the term in common use in the United Kingdom and countries of the Commonwealth, including Australia, South Africa, India, Pakistan and Malaysia, and many other countries in the Eastern Hemisphere. > Before the introduction of UTC on 1 January 1972, Greenwich Mean Time (also known as Zulu time) was the same as Universal Time (UT), a standard astronomical concept used in many technical fields. > In the United Kingdom, GMT is the official time during winter; during summer British Summer Time (BST) is used. GMT is the same as Western European Time. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMT