Web Rebels 2017 – John Feminella – Time and Time Again: Fixing Dates in JS
Time and Time Again: Fixing Dates in JS
In JavaScript, times and dates can take many forms, but none of them represent a complete, unambiguous answer to the simple question “what time is it?”. While almost anyone can look at a clock at determine what time it is, it turns out that humans encode an enormous amount of hidden information into their representations of date and times. Because computers don’t have the benefit of knowing about this hidden information, times can be much more ambiguous.
In this talk, we’ll show how to extend our mental model of JS dates and times so that they become useful. Starting from our everyday understanding, we’ll progress through successively larger and more comprehensive representations until we get to a much more complete picture of how things should work. By the end of the talk, you’ll have an appreciation for how complicated dates and times really are, and you’ll be able to confidently avoid the most common pitfalls.
John Feminella
John Feminella is an avid technologist, occasional public speaker, and curiosity advocate. He serves as an advisor to Pivotal, where he works on helping enterprises transform the way they write, operate, and deploy software. He’s also the cofounder of a tiny analytics monitoring and reporting startup named UpHex.
John lives in Charlottesville, VA and likes meta-jokes, milkshakes, and referring to himself in the third person in speaker bios.