Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Time Zones
summary
Explains why time zones are messy using concrete examples (37 zones, 43 with DST; France spanning 12 zones; Kiribati/Samoa date-line shifts; Morocco’s 2018 permanent DST breaking old C libraries) and how this causes failures. Recommends practical fixes: store timestamps in UTC while keeping the originating timezone with the record, expose RFC3339 timestamps plus a separate timezone field in APIs, beware SQL “timestamp with time zone” conversions, avoid relying on JavaScript Date, note Moment.js is deprecated and the Temporal proposal is at Stage 3.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction
- 2:09Timezone history
- 8:33Politics and economy
- 12:06Daylight saving complexity
- 15:40Computing and databases
- 24:44Date libraries
- 31:292038 bug and leap seconds
- 33:38Off-Earth time zones
- 34:41Antarctica anomalies
- 35:45Conclusion
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