Some thoughts on daylight savings time.
A few weeks ago, my one year old and I dug through a storage bin in the basement and found my old lime green gameboy color, with batteries that were decades old and just a little juice left. Contained within, a cartridge of pokémon gold ready to play.
Starting a new game and listening to some 8-bit music, we pretty quickly got to the question: "Is it Daylight Saving Time now?"
I didn't know the answer back when I first loaded up the game as a kid and nearly 25 years later, honestly? I can still never remember which half of the year is DST.
So fun new thing as a dad of a 1yo: this is the first year where spring forward was the good one.
Usually fall back gives the extra hour of sleep, but the clock isn’t the deciding factor of when I wake up anymore. My kid is. So spring forward gave me the extra hour of sleep.
More or less.
Consider pitching the concept of DST today if it didn't already exist. Everyone once a year decides to move the clock one hour forward, and then six months later, we reverse it and move the clock one hour back. It's unimaginable.
Nobody would agree to it. So how did we get here?
Well in the US, it started in March of 1918 with the Standard Time Act which followed similar changes in Europe during WWI. The library of congress has some fun newspaper articles available online from the time.
In 2018, Prop 7 passed when I was in California, showing a positive sentiment towards getting rid of this twice-a-year nonsense. But, that prop didn't actually implement the change, just the ability for a change to happen in the future.
So is there any hope of change? Right now, with the Uniform Time Act of 1966, states can decide to have permanent standard time (an hour back), but cannot have permanent DST (an hour forward). The only states with year-round standard time today are Hawaii and Arizona.
In 2022, the Sunshine Protection Act proposed permanent DST at a federal level, but after passing in the Senate, it never made it to the House. Newer iterations of this bill have been suggested, but nothing has come of it yet. There is also the open question of whether year-round standard time or DST time is better, for some definition of better.
I don't have a specific story I can think of offhand, but I agree with xkcd/2867 so very much.
Leap second bugs, timezone bugs, dst bugs, browser time vs server time, on and on.
Any part of a software project dealing with datetimes makes me a little extra cautious.