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I wrote a thing about "Storing time for human events" - how if you're building an events website used by actual human beings the standard advice of "convert times to UTC and just store that" isn't actually the best approach simonwillison.net/2024/Nov/27/...

simonwillison.netStoring times for human eventsI’ve worked on various event websites in the past, and one of the unintuitively difficult problems that inevitably comes up is the best way to store the time that an …

Simon Willison

@simonwillison.net

Here is a fun piece of computing history: in 2007 the Bush administration changed when DST started, and because Exchange stored event times converted to UTC Microsoft had to release an "Exchange Calendar Update Tool" to help try and fix everyone's calendars web.archive.org/web/20070302...

30/11/24, 3:49 pm2 reposts15 likes

mborus

@mborus.bsky.social

30 Nov 2024

This is even more true in situations where the „event“ is a moving target, like a vessel traveling between countries. And when one of those is Morocco, where the king can decide to change summer time rules on short notice. It really helps to store the original local times…