JHill

An article on some of the pitfalls regarding time zones, daylight savings time and programming. We ran into a lot of these issues with WorkArea.com, a site we built to capture time and materials at WebLinc. Fun stuff. We made a lot of tough, confusing, decisions. Note that most of the problems described here are about determining single moments in time, not slices of time that could cross daylight savings boundaries and time zones. We had an additional set of business rules to build.

Each year, I have to dig up the calendar for DST dates worldwide and update the tables at WorkArea. I forgot the first year. Scrambling around trying to find and add in the dates on a Monday morning when the time’s wrong was enough to make me add a reoccurring event to my calendar each year, but not enough to make me automate the process.

Ben Franklin, again… There aren’t many ideas that we can come up with that will affect as many people’s daily lives as daylight savings. His original essay from 1784.

Daylight Saving and MovableType

via BoingBoing