Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
-
@d4ng3r0u5 Screw GMT, UTC and ISO formatting.
I'm trying to get everyone to just use Unix timestamps, metric time for the win. It will require a little adjusting, but having a 2 kilosecond meeting or a 1 megasecond sprint makes sense. -
@bittersweet
Would you rather support everyone on DST except one state or no one on DST except one state?
That state, of course, being Arizona (and I want to say another state does't use DST either, but I couldn't tell you which one). -
@RiderExMachina The world is larger than the US, and with our offices and clients spread the world and DST switching at different dates in different countries, I would rather go sit in a corner and get drunk.
-
@bittersweet
That's true, I'm just not privy to non-US DST shenanigans, so ai can't speak for them. -
@RiderExMachina
Yeah that's the worst part: CEST to CET happens in later October, PDT to PST happens a week later in early November.
The sane thing would be of course to let someone enter a date in their local format, IMMEDIATELY convert it to UTC, and handle it as UTC everywhere in your application. Then when it needs to be displayed, let the view layer worry about converting UTC back to the right localized format.
Sadly, almost all startup companies started in a garage or attic by someone who just stored the local datetime as a string field in databases, then 5 years later having grown to 30 million lines of code, and then someone asks, WHY WHY THE FUCK WAS THIS NOT ADDRESSED EARLIER.
That someone being me. Sitting in a corner drenched in tears and booze. -
@bittersweet
I'm sorry for your loss -
-
@bittersweet I had a bet running with myself that you were a database admin or a sysadmin for some legacy Unix monstrosity. I won. Maybe twice after reading this.
People complaining "oh I always have trouble figuring out if the clock goes forwards or backwards in October"
Bitch please, I'm dealing with 12 databases, with SQL dates as local timezone timestamps, and an influxDB in UTC. I'm dealing with a backend server configured in CEST and a middleware layer configured in Pacific time, and a hundred functions which try to keep everything straight because no one dares to migrate it all to UTC at this point.
In the whole argument about DST you hear about sleep psychology, electricity bills and farmers.
But what about me, the poor database administrator? What about all these ugly legacy systems, what about all the UX designers trying to fix time input pickers?
I spend 2 months a year in agony having nightmares of rips and folds in the flow of time. DAYLIGHT SAVING DOESN'T FUCKING MAKE SENSE HOW CAN TIME EXIST TWICE?
rant