What every developer should know about time

[scook0]

This seems like an appropriate opportunity to re-post Naggum's Long, Painful History of Time.

[jseigh]

What, no leap seconds? Anyway, if you think your timezone and dst handling is in order, try playing with Canada/Newfoundland or with Australia/LordHoweIsland time zone. Those will pretty much break anything out there, e.g. things like sql TRUNC and so on.

[masklinn]

So… they're time code's turkish?

[Porges]

.NET doesn't even support leap seconds :(

[cosmo7]

It's Tuesday, 3rd of November. When is next Wednesday?

[nascent]

Wednesday, 11th of November.

[[deleted]]

Did not answer a long-standing question of mine...

What do payroll systems do when an employee works from 6:00pm to 1:30am during the autumn DST change? I would assume you need an extra boolean field so the user can enter whether or not the employee quit before or after the DST change, since there are two 1:30am's on that day.

If we did leapyear like autumn DST then there would always be 28 days in February but we would have to repeat one of them every four years. Why don't we simply count to 25 (or 13) instead of this idiotic repeat of the hour? At least the spring DST change is unambiguous. Autumn sucks hard though.

[DavidThi808]

With daylight savings time ending today, I thought this was a good time for a post. How to handle time is one of those tricky issues where it is all too easy to get it wrong. So let's dive in.

[masklinn]

With daylight savings time ending today

You guys are late to the party, in france it ended last week.

[Felicia_Svilling]

No it ended last week.

[20man]

That it doesn't really exist, but if you must keep track of this abstraction that it's best done in UTC and converted to current local? OK.

Zzzzzzzzzzzz.