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Exploring 120 years of timezones (2021)
Timezones, and daylight saving - the practice of moving clocks forward by one hour once a year - are a pain. They make it hard to schedule international meetings, plan travel, or may simply cause you to be an hour late for work once a year. For a developer, they are even worse! This blog post takes a visual journey through the last 120 years of timezones, daylight saving and the ever changing world time.
In implementing the timezone-aware components of that API, I’ve delved deep into the IANA database, the standard reference for timezones, which contains thousands of rules encoded in text files. In 1900 this dataset of 282 named timezones indicated 220 different offsets (from UTC), and while some of these were integers, (e.g. Europe/Prague, Europe/Rome), the majority were not - for example Moscow was 2 hours, 30 minutes and 17 seconds ahead. A 2016 study found that the economic impact of Daylight Saving, due to increased heart attacks, workplace accidents and cyberloafing (slacking off at work!)
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