Time and Time Again
Time is one of the few forces that remain outside of human control. Attempting to understand it is hard enough, but attempting to make computers understand it is a frequent and common source of errors, especially across different cultures and calendars.
This talk will explore a number of different ways of understanding and expressing the flow of time, as well as common and uncommon edge cases to account for when building software.
This talk will occur at a specific location - that is usually easy enough to understand - and also at a specific time and date. What that time and date actually means is part of a large and complex system of rules and exceptions and changes, which is also only understood by specific cultures or valid in specific regions.
These systems can appear to be simple, but failing to get it right can result in anything from cultural insensitivity to a full-on systems failure.
Join us for a look at time itself, in which we will: - try to understand what this "time" thing actually is - explore different ways that time is represented and communicated - understand different calendar systems and how they interact - learn how to build more resilient and culturally sensitive computer systems
Yaakov is a Principal Software Engineer at WiseTech Global, occasional speaker, open-source contributor, reverse-engineer, hacker, problem solver, amateur radio operator, and Pokémon collector.