How to do timezones?

2018-07-17 23:53  timezones      [permalink]

I feel stupid. I guess I've been put out of my comfort zone. I was thinking about doing something, and then I did, and I thought I'll just primarily make it work for me, but then I noticed "new" items were still two hours behind. Ofcourse that's due to the bias against UTC we have here in my current local timezone. So there you have it. All my programming career, I would just parse dates, and stop before this "+0200" or "-0900" thing that's there at the end. So the right thing to do is go all the way, and with a little effort make it work correctly for not just me, but for any user of this little thing.

But how? I remember these drop-downs with timezones where I typically look-up Brussels or Paris. But it's summer daylight-saving-time for the moment. So it switches to and from only one hour between UTC twice a year (until policy changes), how do I keep track of that? Is there something that I can have the system do this automatically for me? It feels like these are things I should have known all along, but dont. I guess I'll have to start reading somewhere...

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