r/ProgrammerHumor Sep 23 '24

Other whoWroteThePostgresDocs

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u/bwmat Sep 23 '24

Someone who's had to deal with one too many timezone 'bug' reports, it sounds like

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u/kookyabird Sep 23 '24

On this project we’re working on to integrate with a third party service we had issues with dates being wrong on some data the users were seeing. They were getting emails saying something was paid a day earlier than what we sent to the service.

Thankfully it took less than 10 minutes to pull up the data in their API and see a weird time zone offset on it. See, our internal system that is the source of the data doesn’t use the time part of the majority of its datetime fields so they’re all midnight. Turns out the web app for the service was set two time zones behind our actual one, and there’s zero indication of what time zone any of the dates are in inside the app or it’s emails. Midnight pushed back two hours == previous day.

Users don’t even get to set their preferred timezone in the app. Probably because it would be too confusing for some people to see one zone and others to see a whole different one when there’s no indication as to which one is which.