Just saw a rant about date formats between the US and every other country and saw this a few years ago. Seems appropriate

Girl: What's your idea of the perfect date?

Me: dd/mm/yyyy, others formats are confusing

Me: Wait where are you going

Great news, our company's has a brand new security-first product, with an easy to use API and a beautiful web interface.

It is SQL-injection-enabled, XSS-compatible, logins are optional (if you do not provide a password, you are logged in as admin).

The json-api has custom-date formats, bools are any of "1", "0", 1, 0, false or null (but never true). Numbers are strings or numbers. Utf-8 is not supported. Most of our customers use special characters.

The web interface is using plain bootstrap, and because of XSS it is really easy to customize everything.

How the hell this product got launched is beyond me.

Gf: "Why are you such a typist"

Me: "I promise not to buy more keyboards with blue switches..."

Gf: "No, I mean like being racist or sexist, but you discriminate types"

Me: "Uhhh"

Gf: "You are always bitching about how awful date/time types are, with timezones, leap seconds and daylight savings"

Me: Face turns pale, thousand yard stare, vietnam-flashback to when I was writing a calendar scheduling/meeting/matching tool which used 3 databases, with timestamps in different formats, and web frontends for people in offices around the world.

Me, with a soft broken voice: "So?"

Gf: "You've been working on that palette tool this week, and you keep talking about how interesting all these colorspaces, white balances and conversion formulas are"

Me: 🤔

[YYYY]-[MM]-[DD] or [DD]-[MM]-[YYYY]

Across all dashboards and clients we have in current company you'll find one of the above,
Every developer who ever worked on part of the system have chosen either one..

So it's a total mess,
In an attempt to standard all date formats across all our clients I setup a Slack poll,

And guess which one is winning by more than 2x votes!!
[DD]-[MM]-[YYYY] !!!

And here I thought ISO-8601 is enough reason,
But apparently not!

They say our users are more familiar with the other one,,,

It seems main problem is with the education system of this country,
That's how they were thought in schools,

So... FUCK WORLD'S STANDARDS

Fuck you apple, and fuck your god damn shitty documentation.

Working with NFC enabled passes, their documentation says "payload max is 64 bytes"

What they ACTUALLY fucking mean is 64 ascii characters.

Also, the way they handle date time formats is fucked. They say they support W3C formats (iso) but what they actually mean is, they support a half assed version of a subset of it.

I told their chief engineer over a phone call and his response;

"I agree, our documentation is lacking"... HOW ABOUT YOU FUCKING UPDATE IT!

Also, how they handle json is just bad.

what it's like when someone doesnt use "mm/dd/yyyy" or "dd/mm/yyyy":

"I need a name for your reservation. It can either be base64 encoded or a sha3 hash"

"Yeah, I'm on my way, how many light years is it past 404th street?"

"Oh, cool, my birthday's coming up, too. How many eons away is it?"

Microsoft.Graph has filtering capabilities for dates, which is great.

Format is: "2018-04-12T12:00:00Z"

Doesn't natively support string conversion of a DateTime to match the pattern... Nor does Graph accept any date formats such as the "s" parameter for sortable dates, which goes into milliseconds, etc.

DateTime.ToString("derp");

Sometimes I wish I was a Java Dev.

People who use ambiguous date formats should be left alone in an almost empty sewage tanker with a horny orangutan.

semi dev related(later half)
A common and random thought I have:

A lot of units that humans use are either needlessly arbitrary or based on something weird. Like Fahrenheit. That shit is weird! 0°F is the freezing point of a water and salt solution. What a weird fucking thing to use!

But also, I like Fahrenheit more. Probably because it's what I was raised with and switching is tedious (though I'm trying. I'd like to use metric more), but also because one degree F is a smaller, more precise change. You can describe more accuracy without decimals.

On the other hand I prefer metric for length. Centimeters, and centimeters are way more precise and way less confusing than inches and .... 1/8th inches? Who the fuck decided on 1/8ths?!

Which brings me to my common thought:

If you look at a Unix timestamp, you can approximate somewhat when it happened. Knowing the current timestamp and a few reference points you can see RELATIVELY what a epoch stamp translates to. A few days ago, an hr ago, 2014ish.

This leads me to think that if we actually taught from a young age to think in epoch as a unit (not as a replacement to normal date formats but as a secondary at first) that we could just naturally read epoch time in the same manner we read dates like "28/01/2006 14:24:10 UTC"

In your brain you automatically know how old you were when that timestamp happened. What grade/job and where you lived at the time. What season it was. You know how far into the day it was, a little before lunch (or after or whatever, your time zone will vary). Now try with 1138458250. I can usually get roughly the year, and month if I really think about it, but that's it. And it takes much more effort

I'm sure there's other units we could benefit from but epoch is the one that usually brings this to mind for me.

Why the fuck is midnight 00:00 and midday 12:00? Every other hour is the same for Am and Pm in 12 hour time. I can’t find any explanation other than all of humanity being unable to count.

All date/time libraries must encounter this bullshit. There are so many similar levels of bullshit with everything related to time handling. Time zones, stamp formats, minimum intervals overflows are all so fucked.

info coreutils --node='Date input formats'

Unix💓

Dear fucking MicroSoft,

I really like the C# language, but the default System types have some little fucks up.

Like, if the DateTime.ToString() accepts "HH" to display hours with leading 0, WHY THE FUCK DOESN'T TimeSpan.ToString()?

Truly yours,
ZioCain

Been using a jump drive compiled as NTFS for my sneaker net. I copied some file to it from Ubuntu 18.04. I take to Windows machine and it says there are errors (does this a lot). Usually it works fine. The files I copied are not there. They were downloaded web pages as Windows machine is not on net. I noticed the file names have characters like #, ? and ` in them. So I reformat the jump drive to exFat. I copy the files from Ubuntu plus a bunch of other files. It errors like crazy on stuff that copied fine before with NTFS. Not a solution. So I find an alternate downloader for web pages I want to copy (does not have funky characters in filenames). I reformat back to NTFS on jump drive.

So basically if I want to copy files from my Ubuntu system I am stuck with NTFS and always repairing the filesystem. Yes, all my libraries for exFAT are up to date in Ubuntu.

Is there ever going to be a better way?
When is Windows going to grow up and support ext4?
Why?

Its 2019 and we still have incompatible networks and filesystem formats.

Employer:
What is your idea of "The Perfect Date" ?

Employee (Female Software Developer):
DD/MM/YYYY

Other formats can be confusing really.

Date pickers!

After several decades of web development and even longer time to experiment with electronic UI on other devices, why is there no consistent best practice and everyone tries reinventing the weel to choose their own set of problems and annoyances?

The root cause, obviously, is using Gregorian calendar and localized display and input format in the first place, so there is no way to make a data unambiguous without a graphical calendar. Who even came up with any of those 9/10/11 formats and why?

So we need to use date pickers and make the users spend several minutes clicking, swiping or scrolling to enter their birthday - past at least one decade - and a booking date - in the near future - using the same interface with the same presets.

But users compare different offers, so they will use different sites, so they will have to handle different date pickers on different sites in a short period of time and carry unnecessary mental load.