Time & Date guides
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Time & Date
Understanding Dates & Time: Timestamps, Time Zones, Formats & Date Math
Why dates and time are deceptively hard — how computers count time as a single number, why time zones and daylight saving complicate everything, the standard formats, and why date arithmetic is full of traps.
11 min read
Time & Date
Unix Timestamps Explained: Epoch Time & the Year 2038 Problem
What a Unix timestamp is, why counting seconds from 1970 makes time easy for computers, the difference between seconds and milliseconds, and the looming Year 2038 problem.
9 min read
Time & Date
Time Zones & UTC Explained: Offsets, Daylight Saving & Why It’s Hard
What UTC is and why everything is defined from it, how time-zone offsets work, why daylight saving time makes offsets change, and the rule that prevents most time-zone bugs.
10 min read
Time & Date
ISO 8601 Explained: The International Date & Time Format
Why 06/12/2026 is ambiguous and 2026-06-12 is not, how to read a full ISO-8601 timestamp including the time-zone designator, and why it sorts perfectly as plain text.
8 min read
Time & Date
Date & Time Math: Why Calculating With Dates Is So Tricky
Leap years, uneven months, daylight-saving days that are not 24 hours, business-day counting and add-one-month ambiguity — the edge cases that make date arithmetic deceptively hard.
9 min read