- Timezones - They are not always on the hour - Difference time offset and timezone - (locale stuff, formatting, DST transition dates, etc.) - Daylight savings - Days can be 23 or 25 hours long - Countries change their DST rules all the time - Dates, times, datetimes - Maybe you don't actually want to store full timestamps for literally everything - Time math is tricky - Adding 24 hours != adding one day (leap days / seconds) - Calendars - Historical calendars are very weird (kings just removing or adding days when they felt like it) - The calendar we use, and its extensions: Gregorian calendar, proleptic Gregorian calendar - Other calendars: Jewish calendar, Chinese lunar calendar (?), Hijiri - Primarily used for establishing holidays, but not really for common use any more (with the exception of China...?) - Computer clocks - CPU time vs. wall time - Monotonic clocks - Two kinds on Linux: one that smears forward, one that does not - Jiffies - Atomic clocks - NTP / chrony - Useful specs: - RFC3339: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3339 - iCal: https://icalendar.org/RFC-Specifications/iCalendar-RFC-5545/ - Recurrence rules (RRULE): https://icalendar.org/iCalendar-RFC-5545/3-8-5-3-recurrence-rule.html - NOBODY USES ISO8601 STOP SAYING THAT THEY DO - NO ONE KNOWS WHAT IT IS - RFC3339 IS THE ONLY ONE ANYONE SHOULD USE - Accuracy of onboard clocks - Quartz oscillators - subject to drift - How to correct inaccurate clocks - Time smearing - Presentation and formatting? - The UNIX epoch, and the year 2038 problem - ISO "week date" (does this matter to anyone) - Falsehoods I think are actually important - "Always store time in UTC" - "Always store fully-qualified timestamps" i.e. datetimes with timezone, not just dates - "The smallest unit of time is X" (i.e. store the start and end of your time ranges precisely, never store 11:59:59) You get a time you trust - then you work with it in some way (???) - https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time - https://engineering.fb.com/2021/08/11/open-source/time-appliance/ - https://github.com/opencomputeproject/Time-Appliance-Project/tree/master/Open-Time-Server/ - https://lettier.github.io/posts/2016-04-26-lets-make-a-ntp-client-in-c.html - https://audiogramii.wordpress.com/2018/03/31/time-smearing/ - https://docs.ntpsec.org/latest/leapsmear.html - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/look-before-you-leap-the-coming-leap-second-and-aws/ - https://sudonull.com/post/29903-Writing-a-Simple-NTP-Client - https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/linux-device-drivers/9781785280009/4041820a-bbe4-4502-8ef9-d1913e133332.xhtml - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY - Official timezone database: https://www.iana.org/time-zones ## How to use dates and times ## Time accuracy / how to get accurate times ## Fun tangents East Asian countries treat birthdays differently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asian_age_reckoning. In particular, Koreans (and others??) all celebrate their birthday on January 1, and start counting at 1 instead of 0.