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by anamexis 1177 days ago
It can be a source of bugs if the tz is explicit, as well. Consider storing people's birthdates. If you accidentally store it as UTC and use some implicit tz handling, suddenly you've got off-by-one birthdates.

More succinctly, dates don't have timezones because they don't have times.
2 comments
eyelidlessness 1177 days ago
An example I like to use is medication reminders. For some, you need them to be at absolute time intervals: UTC is likely appropriate, and omitting time offsets could be disastrous. Others are more appropriate at periods of the experienced waking day, and using UTC could be extraordinarily disruptive eg while traveling.
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p1necone 1177 days ago
Another case that pops up a lot is dealing with dates from third party systems that aren't timezone aware. Trying to convert them without knowing what timezone they were supposed to be in in the first place doesn't work, you have to just display them with no conversion.
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eyelidlessness 1177 days ago
Oh yeah I hesitate to even go into this because it’s been a huge source of traumatic burnout dealing with the fallout of it being mishandled.
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pacaro 1177 days ago
The best real-world example I've heard of comes from a friend who works for a travel company.

You're creating a schedule for a tour. The tour occurs some time in the future. You have a daily itinerary for the tour group.

Now the destination country changes their time zone in some fashion. You don't want to have ever stored an instant, you want the date and time to be more abstract. 9am, as it will be understood at that date and time in the future.

The same also occurs for past events, but we don't tend to encounter that too often, although the calendar for September 1752 in the UK (at the time known as the Kingdom of Great Britain) shows another wrinkle

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radicality 1177 days ago
I swear that some variant of this bug happened to me in gCal. I set myself some yearly recurring events, I think a birthday or a names-day, and clearly marked it as an “All Day” event and I set it to repeat Yearly.

I don’t remember if it was in 1 or 2 or even more years, but Google calendar absolutely did make the event off-by-one day.

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