Friday, November 1, 2013

Daylight Saving time, explained...

Daylight Saving time, explained...  This video is not technical, and is actually quite entertaining.  It does a fine job explaining the complexities of Daylight Saving time at a high level.

I once had the thankless job of writing some software that could take an arbitrary date and time in any time zone and figure out the equivalent date and time in any other time zone.  There were two things that made this job difficult: Daylight Saving time and time zones.  Both are far, far more complex than most people understand (just look at the time zone map at left!).  When I finally finished that software, I had almost 10,000 lines of code – and I was making changes on a weekly basis just to keep up with the changes various countries made in their Daylight Saving or time zone rules.  Just finding out about these changes was hard (it's a little better today).

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