Timekeeping can be a pain in the ass

​It's been a while since I’ve written one of these. Last time I wrote an entry in here I only had one child, worked at another office and lived in a different country. I've been busy and life got in the way... So it's fitting my next post is about timekeeping!

How many times, as a developer, have you had to deal with a timezone or daylight savings bug? Myself, I have had to deal with so many that I don't think I can list them all. Probably the most entertaining one was when I was working at a factory site where IT had just installed a new payroll system. The factory worked night shifts and workers were paid by the hour. An employee would tag in and out using a palm reader. Pay would then be calculated based on the number of hours spent on their shift based on the time between when he tagged in and out. You’d think it's easy stuff right? 

Think again... The system was happily running for almost a year before a number of workers made a fuss about being paid 1 hour less on one of the night shifts. It turned out that on the night when daylight savings ended, the computer turned the clock back one hour. This meant that anyone working that night shift had worked one hour more than what the application had calculated. The HR department noted however that nobody had complained six months previously, when the daylight savings came into effect and everyone got paid for one extra hour that wasn’t real.

Bugs in timezones/daylight savings can be more serious. A bank I worked with few years ago moved hosting servers from one country to another. The new servers were mistakenly configured to run under a different timezone. This caused a bunch of stock options to be exercised a few hours late. The bank made big losses of money and reputation.

Is keeping time so complicated? It turns out it is... pretty much. Let's try to look at why this is.

​So what’s a timezone?

​The idea behind timezones is that wherever you are in the world the sun should rise and set at more or less the same time. Have a look at the picture above. This shows a simplified view of how this should work. The world is first divided into vertical slices (called meridians). An arbitrary one is then picked and called the prime meridian. Going west you reduce the hours with reference to the prime meridian, going east you increase it. You keep on doing this until you meet on the other side of the world. Once there, you take a swim in the Pacific, toss a coin on whether it should be a -12 or a +12 and congratulate yourself on a job well done.

One of the problems is that timezones weren't decided by one guy on gap year going around the world. They were decided and modified throughout history by various governments in many countries. To say this caused a lot of complications is the understatement of the year. Why, you might ask? Let me demonstrate with an example. Can you guess what's so special about the group of islands of Samoa shown here in the picture?
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​​The government of Samoa didn't like that it was the last country on earth to go to sleep. In December 2011 they decided Samoa would switch timezone from UTC-11 to UTC+13! Yes you read correctly. Timezone UTC+13 should not even exist. The government did cite economic reasons for doing this, such as their biggest trade partner being Australia, but really we all know they did it so they can be the first to say “Happy New Year!”.

This created all sorts of weirdness. For example anyone living in Samoa had to wipe out an entire day off their calendar, the 30 December 2011. I wonder what people did if they had a flight booked on that day or say a dentist appointment? American Samoa, just 30km east is now 25hrs behind. Crazy stuff eh? 

The history book is full of examples like these. Nepal has a timezone of +5:45, Mumbai +5:30 and countries like Portugal and Spain have different timezones even though they overlap! It's fair to say that keeping time across countries is a hairy business.

The situation gets even more complex when you introduce daylight savings. Daylight savings was introduced during the war (apparently to save fuel). The idea is that in summer when days are longer time is moved forward by one hour. Although apparently there is a place called Lord Howe Island (Australia) that only moves half an hour...

What is the problem doc?

Let me explain by using an example. Let's say you arranged a meeting at 1:30am on the 25th October (in the UK). Most countries in Europe, on this date, move the hour back to winter time. At 2am the clock is moved back to 1am and everyone gets to sleep an hour more, well unless you have a meeting at 1:30am.

Now if you think about it, you will live through 1:30am twice on that night. Will the meeting happen on the first 1:30am, the second or will you just have to hold it twice? This isn't a big problem right? Nobody holds meetings at this hour. Well what if you had a flight departing at that time? Or maybe you have a night shift starting at that hour? Or a nuclear reactor where the rods need to be retracted at exactly 1:30am ONCE?
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​There are loads of other problems such as:
1. Countries change timezones
2. Countries change daylight savings rules
3. Converting between timezone for a specific historical date requires political history
4. Switching from winter to summer time and back causes problems
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Ok fine, let's look at the tools available so we can make time keeping easier.

​Standard Times

​These come in various names, GMT, UTC, Zulu time and many others. They have basically the same idea. Have a time defined that isn’t affected by timezone or daylight.

Standard times evolved from when British naval captains used to keep one of their watches to the time at home (UK is on the zero meridian). The timezones of the different countries they sailed to used to be defined relative to this time. This standard time is what is known today as GMT (Greenwich mean time). From this evolved UTC (coordinated universal time) which is what is used today. A timezone is usually referred to as UTC+/-X.

Why is standard time useful for us? Because it gives us an easy way to convert from one timezone to another. If the time is 2pm in NY UTC-5 what is the time in Spain UTC+1? Simply add 5 to convert to UTC and add another 1 to convert UTC to Spain.

​Timezone database

IANA maintains a historical timezone record for all countries. This lists all the timezones and daylight savings applied to countries over the years. Typically the database goes back up to the 19th century. It also contains future changes to timezones that have been publicly announced by the governments. 

The database is updated frequently. Here’s an excerpt taken from an update done in March 2015:

“Mongolia will start observing DST again this year, from the last Saturday in March at 02:00 to the last Saturday in September at 00:00. (Thanks to Ganbold Tsagaankhuu.)
Palestine will start DST on March 28, not March 27.  Also, correct the fall 2014 transition from September 26 to October 24. Adjust future predictions accordingly.  (Thanks to Steffen Thorsen.)”

The database keeps its histories in two sections; one dealing with timezones and the other with daylight savings. Here’s another excerpt taken from the actual database:
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​​The history shows that in 1942 Portugal moved the clock forward twice, in March and then in April. In August and then in October it moved the clock backwards again. Apparently this double DST happened in the UK too during WW2. Fascinating, right?

In the second section we see that Portugal was on the same timezone as Spain (GMT+1). This lasted from 1992 to 1996. My guess is that after 4 year of eating dinner late they decided that having dinner in the middle of the night like the Spaniards was just too late for them.

​Libraries

​Libraries and tools for the IANA database exist in every programming language. Many languages (such as a JVM language) come bundled with timezone libraries, however these need to be updated from time to time to the latest IANA database. For example in Java you can update to the latest database either by keeping up to date with the last JVM release or simply running a tzupdater tool periodically (just google “tzupdater Java tool” for more details).

​Ok now what?

So we saw the tools available to tackle the complexities of timekeeping. How do we use it? The answer is surprisingly simple. To explain this let’s look at an industry which has solved this problem already.

The aviation industry has solved this problem by completely ignoring it. Instead of dealing with each individual country and its timekeeping politics, they decided “screw it, we’re keeping our own time and we shall call it the ZULU time”. The Zulu time happens to be equivalent to UTC,  the difference is that it’s written in a different format. For example here’s a weather report used by pilots (pilots use this format as it’s concise, unambiguous and they can read it really quickly):

EIDW 241430Z 11007KT 050V150 9999 FEW024 SCT250 20/12 Q1021 NOSIG

The bit in bold (1430Z) shows the time this report was issued, 2:30pm UTC. Aviation uses this time format for everything and anywhere on earth. Examples include radio communications, airport time slots, ETAs, forecasts, log reporting etc… This simplifies things and makes everything unambiguous, thus avoiding situations like “Controller: Err… when you say, you’ll be over Italy at 12:35 is that in the departure, arrival or Italian timezone?”

The idea here is to use the same technique when writing our applications. Every time you start thinking about a clever algorithm to convert timezones or to negate the effects of DST:

It’s a pretty simple solution right? 

• You need to store a date? Use UTC!
• You need to compare two dates? Use UTC!
• You need to find the time differences? Use UTC!
• You need to pass a date to another application/service? Yep, you guessed it.

Basically use UTC all the time.

Any exceptions? Well obviously yes. But it’s only a simple one really. Only convert to the local timezone when you want to display a date to a user. For this you just display the UTC date converted to the timezone that the user is located in. EASY! Come to think of it this is what aviation does too:

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Malta Airport where the local time is 9:30am and the temperature is 32 degrees. For your safety and comfort, please remain seated with your seatbelt fastened until the Captain turns off the Fasten Seat Belt sign.”
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