this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
886 points (94.7% liked)
Programmer Humor
32710 readers
525 users here now
Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Rules:
- Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
- No NSFW content.
- Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It’s only bad when used incorrectly. Just store time in UTC and convert it to timezone of your setting to present it. Most modern languages offer a library that makes it just one more line of code. Not only it’s then clear and unambiguous, it supports all timezones.
Doesn't always work, especially if you need to work with any sort of calendar or recurring schedule.
Yeah, timestamps should always be stored in UTC, but actual planning of anything needs to be conscious of local time zones, including daylight savings. Coming up with a description of when a place is open in local time might be simple when described in local time but clunkier in UTC when accounting for daylight savings, local holidays, etc.
An Instant represents single point on the universal time line. This can always be converted to LocalTime and vice versa. For periodic jobs, you calculate the next occurrence in the local time and then save it as an Instance (UTC).
bingo. Timezones became easier when I learned that all apps and databases should have all times be in UTC. Let the UI do it's thing and accept local time and convert it, and vis versa.
+1 for this. This is kinda the same issue with encoding, just UTF-8 everything and move on.