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by squeaky-clean 1043 days ago
Another detail about dates people often forget or don't know (though it's not usually important), is that a "date" can be 50 hours long. Let's say you want to have some sale to occur all day on Christmas, midnight to midnight in your customer's local time.

For easier math let's say your business is in GMT tz. People in the Line Islands (Pacific/Kiritimati) will have access to the sale 14 hours before yourself. Then the sale-time occurs in GMT, 24 hours pass, and the sale ends in GMT. But people in American Somoa (Pacific/Midway) will still have the sale active for 11 hours. (Technically someone using satellite internet in the open ocean east of Samoa has 12 hours, but the UTC+12 timezone is completely uninhabited).

Such a sale is kind of a farfetched example, but I've encountered this issue when trying to do analytics reports looking at user data that happens on specific global holidays.

2 comments

And when you interact with people 8 time zones away, concepts like "today" or "tomorrow" break down completely. It's a very uncanny feeling.
I remember having a call with two colleagues once, I was in Sydney, one colleague was in london and one in LA

It was quite surreal, although time wise I think the LA person was up early on Tuesday and I was up late.

One member of my D&D group moved to Denmark, one moved to Tokyo. The rest of us are on the US east coast. We have the hang of it now, but for our first few online sessions there was always someone who missed it because they showed up a full day late or early.

It's also funny how some of the group is having coffee and breakfast while other members are getting drunk and having midnight snacks.

On the project I'm on now, we have regular weekly meetings like that. One guy in the UK, one guy in the DC area, me in Texas, another guy in Seattle, and another guy in Sydney. Plus possibly some other people that might also join from some of those same timezones.

I now have an app that runs continuously in my menu bar to track all the different time zones that I care about. Tel Aviv and Tokyo also figure into the equation sometimes.

> the UTC+12 timezone is completely uninhabited

New Zealand would like a word.

If it was a burn, it was pretty hot.