A Quick Note About Timezones

Tags: programming

Some of you lead programming lives that involve 3D graphics, or physics simulations, or DNA sequencing. You’re so deep into these domains that you’ve never had to deal with such mundane things as dates and times in your code. Bravo. I’m jealous. Skip the rest of this post and go make something cool.

Two people stopped reading, and the rest of us poor saps are left to talk a bit about time zones. Don’t worry, this’ll be quick.

Make sure your code is aware of timezones. Do you have a timestamp/date/datetime field in your database anywhere? Is your database smart enough to note the timezone of its clients? Is your software aware enough to know that it may be running code on behalf of users that are in a different timezone than itself? Are your servers running in the same timezone as your development machine?

I can’t answer yes to all of those questions, so I’ve gotta go work on some code…