Where Does Time Come From?

The server side

And Well, you know, that's really all we have to say about time. This has just been a little bit of time pontification Your server lives in a location. You live in a location.

where she'll say, Tom, can you tell your story whenever they're in a group setting? Like, in just JS, like, a prank because he doesn't have a story prepared. Like, what what stuff. What kind of story do you want me to tell? So he just says, Scott, can you tell your story? I I got that same vibe. But my story was

the situation

or or restarted? This is actually very funny. And a small aside, it says in the show notes, Scott, tell your story.

I I cannot explain it if if, you know, this was unsolved mysteries. You could queue up some spooky music. It's the spookiest thing that's ever happened to me on my computer, and, like, working with daytime is spooky enough already. So, honestly, who knows? I I have no no answer to what happened there, but it it was a knock. So bizarre.

my mind.

had something in the browser where you were getting a date from 2022,

like a 2 year old time stamp. And then what happened? You rebooted your computer Almost tripping out being like, where does time come from? You know? I was tripping out too. Yeah. Yeah. Your browser knows the time, but, like, where's your browser get it? Your browser gets it from your computer. Where's your computer time? Well, maybe there's, like, a chip on the motherboard. Okay. Well or or maybe it gets it from we'll talk about where time comes from in a second. But I was just like, Woah. Woah. Like, time is just this thing we made up,

I was loading up a date server side and client side. It was in an SSR component.

What this is the same function being run on the client and the server, And the date is off by a day a year.

Like you

What is time. And how do we deal with time? We're not gonna be talking about space time here or anything like that, but more or less time in the browser. This kind of tripped me out when you're you posted about, date API.

was returning in the server. It's my own internal process. The server side was returning a date That was Node day off and 1 year off. And my

the, the one they they just got married. The Node, she does this thing to her husband Man, little batteries like that, they do all sorts of weird stuff. Did you you you know, like, here, which is attached to no time zone. So we we also have,

I was doing some date stuff, and new date on anything, the very first thing a It definitely may not be the very first thing, but what it does to your date is it it always goes to the time zone in which the system is running on.

The says 27 time zones,

Another thing that everybody hates about the JavaScript

for a full archive of all of our shows. Jump. And don't forget to subscribe in your podcast player

to San Francisco, but, like, it never changed back.

so you gotta watch those things. Yep.

have to worry about

if I tell you my birthday is February 18

People that work on those types of things,

Okay. And then a plain time.

those booking or the once when we flew to San Francisco, my Google Calendar changed

very, very tricky. You wanna know you wanna hear a a further and this is more of a conceptual problem with date, but also a a problem nonetheless. I was working on, at one point, a booking app. It was a startup I worked at. It was a booking app, and it was kind of like, what if Instagram had booking? Right? You could look at tattoos

website.

You know, specifically, I would love to get some of these for our spooky stories, But we're a long ways off from October.

You're gonna have to confuse the heck out of the user trying to make them select the time zone and stuff like that. Yeah. Do not envy It will overflow And for some some stupid reason, makes a whole lot of sense

date time all the way. So there's a a plain year month, a plain month day, a plain date, What do you know about ISO

more sane. Wes you don't necessarily

The CSS, 2nd February 18.

Which is a giant pain mutating the date. So this is gonna give us immutable methods on the date APIs.

If you if you want to avoid any of that hassle, the temporal API will luckily be there to help us. It'll give us better parsing.

And one of the questions we had that we never got Good answer for it because the company folded before we got the answer to this problem

to Michigan, which we'll talk about,

And then, oh, here, I wanna book with this person because I've seen their portfolio. Right? 1970. Now what's interesting here is I didn't know about this being an issue in computer science. We got a bit of a y two k situation going on here. They call it the 2038 Problem, and it's not something that you have to worry about so that Adobe's checks would check, you know, they they wouldn't check to see. So that was the strategy that I heard you could do Wes to change the Yarn in which your computer was set out to install the software. This, be warp, if you pass it into a new date function, it does take time zones into account. For instance,

But also makes working with just dates, Jump. You know, it's the difference between something happening at Node second versus the very next second.

So, honestly, I just wanna hear what kind of situations people have hit with time or the just the date API in general in JavaScript.

and what kind of solutions did you find, or are you still looking for correct solutions? you know, this is something I think I think people did, you know, like, 10 years ago or so, but it was an interesting strategy. That Wes

hey. When I save a date to the database, I don't necessarily always want it to be Attached to a particular time zone. Yeah. So what do you do? You then gotta take the step to turn everything to UTC.

make working with time zones old school Nintendo games, Did you know that games that were able to, like, persist save files because they didn't have storage on them, that was done via a little battery within the game cartridge.

Wes if if if I am traveling

and I want to book an appointment in Denver for noon Denver time.

Plain date Node is going to be super handy. So for an example,

And then every time you access it, You gotta make sure you access it with the UTC methods,

What types of things are you looking forward to in the temporal API? Hit us up at syntax f m on any of the socials date API is the fact that anytime you do anything, it mutates about time.

Plain date,

you know, Kron, the calendar, has done a really nice job kind of solving this where they'll put the columns. Since I work with a bunch of eastern time folks, I have, the date,

What kind of major hiccups have you hit, Where we are, essentially. Think about it this way.

That's

So people kept booking me at, like, like, 6:30 at night for talks. And I'm just like, Hey. Like, I'm I'm I'm not here. I'm like, oh, sorry. Your your calendar said you were in San Francisco, 2 things. It adds time zone

And we would love to read out some time stuff. Might be cool to do a follow-up in a potluck later on. Duty. Alright. Thanks for tuning in. Catch you later.

our 27

minutes here, and that's okay. I wanna know what kind of crazy bugs you've hit with time.

What's the default? What do you show them by default? Yeah. You show them the Denver time by default, or do you show them the eastern time? Do you show them both times? And, or I'm gonna say this. If you know anybody who's starting a podcast, you Node, you know, you hear the word podcast,

and they don't have daylight savings time.

Apparently,

colon hour hour colon m m colon s s, and then you can do some time zone stuff in there too. So Yeah. You can you can add, like by default, z is UTC,

Tokyo

2024 I'm just running a new date.

The way in which is like a standardized way to to format a date. It's,

names.

the JavaScript not including a time zone,

When I launch a course, I message my entire slack room and it does a little, hey,

38 time zones in the world because some of them are off 35:30

heads up. You're messaging

You know, Arizona had no daylight savings time.

into my console this morning, and it output February 29, the Time. Where does time come from? When you say new date in your browser, output a date somehow on, Stuff. It's a it's a whole lot of stuff. And, What should I store it as? Makes a lot of sense to store it as ISO 8601,

Randy, our producer, is nodding away another Canadian podcast. Good.

I ran, new date, is it does

Let's see. Colorado

there's and

or and many It's a Canadian podcast, so

because that's easy to work with and, just about everything understands it. Right. You can pass it into And one of the big things that it does

I don't know what the name JS. The RFC math of, oh, they're 1 hour off of us for half the year and they're 2 hours off

that is part of the joy of working in this stuff. If you wanna just say, hey. Give me a date, and then now turn it into a JavaScript date, You've gotta understand or drop a review if you like this show.

That crazy. I did not I did not know that that existed.

The offset of UTC. Right? The offset. That's obnoxious. Plus 5 is is eastern. But this might be a bit of an issue for you in, what, 14 years from Node, But if you're saving time in databases,

which is kinda wild. Yeah. And daylight savings time is, you know, something that is changing.

for whatever reason, a 32 bit integer.

How exactly client, the browser, was returning the correct date. And I said A whole year. Okay. I'm I'm going to lose

year year year is great. That's a lot of fun because all this stuff is so much fun when you're working JavaScript. Time zones are the most painful thing to work with in programming. You know what? When I say give me a date, I just want a date. I don't necessarily want And that can be really nice because when you're dealing with JavaScript dates, in the world could be going on? I restarted my computer,

Does that mean anything to us? ISO 8061 is my favorite standard of all time.

and you're trying to decide, hey. I wanna store this date as a drink.

So so, six zero Node? but a instant does include a time zone. Right? A or a zoned date time does include a time zone as well.

is moving to no daylight savings time. I don't know if everybody is or what, but, For Standardization.

No. I'm I'm not sure. Like, that's a that's a standard for It's another proposal

So that is a concern anytime you're passing in these numbers. Right? Because the ISO

hyphen month month hyphen day day

Okay? The ISO. That's what the ISO is.

a new standard, which is the Node $1,000,000, 10000 And and how that crappy episode. How that gets

to 45 minutes.

and that's because there's 27. There's so somewhere in Canada, I think it's like St. John's or something Wes they're half an hour off.

is being used as well, This whole wall of lava lamps,

time all the time. I don't always want a time zone. I just want the same date we're all talking about. We're all talking about the same date here. Yep. It's March 1, 1986. That's my birthday. We're all talking about that same date. I don't care

That sounds like no fun. But, like, if you ever see like, let's say

Yeah. It's about to get funky. Do you know how many time zones there are in the world, Scott? the other half year. So now you'll be able to do just square bracket Converted Asia

50,000 people in, That. Yeah. Because if you crack open,

2024.

for these time stamps. But it adds

86 o one. And if you just pass in a date without a time zone, it assumes UTC

And it's basically And so that's one of the ways at least makes working with this stuff a little bit more sane because one of the things that I've struggled with is,

24? No. Actually so

date API.

and then you can instead of just putting z on the end, you can do plus or minus. Like, plus Yes. 5 would be eastern.

So right now we just have plus

They they correspond to how random things are. So, like, that's more random

atomic clock. And Wow. If you look at it, it's a bunch of, like, gears

like, a 40

At the very lowest level, there are things called atomic clocks,

than a computer chip. Yeah. And I'm gonna link up to they have a blog post Blending that, and it's one of the coolest things. It's it's one of the when I learned that they did that, I was just like,

for their SSL certificates,

and

And apparently that's the most accurate way You know, Cloudflare needs randomness

trading of your computers. That's why Wes have became

hell, yeah. That's awesome.

So atomic clocks. Now we have network time. So Ten other different servers out there, and then that gets dispersed to a different number of them. And basically you can ping any of these

So you told me that story, and I just started, like,

right in their data center. And if you look it up, they're pretty crazy. And Jeff Bezos

and they have a camera on them. And based on where the blobs are in these lava lamps, let's talk about that.

who keeps track of time?

randomness built into computer chips is

somewhat random, but it can be figured out how random something will be. So they have these, like, lava lamps, And,

randomness.

I'm not sure how that works. That's the same thing with

that spin, And it's so bizarre because my wife's family lives in Saskatchewan, and you have to, like, do the mental 33339.

to keep track of time. Like, if you were to say, like, hey, how could you keep track of time as accurate as possible? I would not tell you, let's get 80 gears and just put them together,

many the current time, there's these things called or there's a protocol, NTP, network time protocol,

year just Node, But then you try to display that

to actual, like, digital time.

You know? That it's connected to space itself. That's gonna trip you up it even more. Yeah. So, 1970.

places will have atomic clocks of a computer, there's a little CR Wes 32 battery, and

But because of that, it meant having to say goodbye You're choosing to more sane,

yeah. Honestly, if you're looking to start a podcast, check out Chris Lemon productions dotca. Appreciate all your work. Thank you, Chris. Yeah. Yeah. Again

just throw Chris's website around lemon productions.ca.

So with that said within JavaScript.

and and give him an opportunity here to insert something if he would like.

what are some things about temporal time zones, that sort of stuff. This is gonna be a little bit of a conversation So that code is the same code. It's running client side. It's running server Node. So that very clearly eliminates

I'm just gonna start referring to this as a Canadian podcast. Is that okay, Scott? I have Canadian blood. It's fine. Yeah. My my grandparents came from Montreal, so

to deal with time. Time passes, or even just reach out to us in our potluck form on the syntax.fm that is a bug waiting to happen. Right? Yeah. So, like,

so that he can say hi to you, everyone.

Onto the very capable hands of Randy. It's been a lot of fun to be welcomed by the syntax community and by all of you great developer nerds even though most of my web dev knowledge died alongside front page 98. Scott said, if you've got questions about starting or editing a podcast, hit me up at lemonproductions.ca

We have brought editing in house. In fact, we have a a new producer, Sanity

very happy about that.

on the web, I, Chris on Twitter, or at Lemon Podcasting on YouTube. As usual, I'll be sure to put all the links in the show notes. Enjoy the rest of the show. Definitely check out, Chris, his Lemon Productions dotca. Of course. I was actually really happy. Chris is a Canadian

Let me just take a quick moment to give It's Scott hit the time servers to keep going. Yeah. Well, let's talk about epoch time really quick. Pnpm epoch time is the number of seconds that have elapsed since January 1st really important

We're gonna be talking about

And what are some of the pitfalls of working with time, what are some formats,

Time. Time. Time passes. We we get a a,

for so long.

new editor for the podcast, and we talk about we get new JavaScript APIs What the time zone is in Denver for that date. But yeah. Well, you know what is interesting here is something we've talked about quite a bit on this show is the temporal API. And we often say that the temporal API fixes So this this is just an interesting little tidbit.

new editor. Sanity, also Canadian.

He's he's Just a a fantastic guy and has done a great job for us. So thank you, Chris, and we are going to miss you here on Syntax.

team wherein might I have the time stamp in my code incorrectly.

you know, you may have heard us say Chris cut that out or anything like that. And he he he's just been an incredible

Rector, who will bring on to the show at some point here,

to our longtime editor, Chris. And, delivering this podcast

and it's a protocol that where, basically, there are For a number of servers out there, there's different levels of them. There's like 1 level, which is the atomic clock, and then the time gets dispersed to and servers.

One of the things that are Wes it shows the date typically, kind of like code row numbers in your code text editor. And so it'll show me 2 PM, 4 PM, 3 PM, 5 PM. So I can always see which one is which, and I can tell which one is my default one. It's nice. But in a like a booking situation where you're just trying to list, Here's the available appointments. It's 8 o'clock or whatever.

Wes lives in the location. If I do new Scott date from where I am and my server does new dot date and West does new dot date, chances are those are all going to be a new date function. However,

People who've done it, though. I've heard. And I also heard that, when when that had been done, sometimes you needed to change the date

stuff. It it was dead, dead, dead. The time sometimes the time is off. I didn't check this one, but it's happened in the past.

you know, what exactly the time zone differences is and how we can calculate that difference and how that matters based on There's a podcast I listen to that's like a, an Australian couple. It's just 2 comedians.

The Network Time Updates. Right.

That was the case.

despite the fact that we're all talking about the exact same time here. And and it gets even worse with serverless or edge compute Wes it's rendering

but you may be expecting it to run on a specific time. And I even had a weird issue

But why why is time important, Scott? Wes

Stuff. That is you don't know that there's a fuse in it or, b, a little coin cell battery that has died that you don't know exists either. Wes is the kind of guy you wanna get that info from. He's always fixing

in development is understanding

on your computer,

it might not be relevant. You may have already fixed this problem. Not relevant. Right? the 1 on the server side, not the client side, Wes.

There's a battery in it, but if you don't drive it for a while, the battery goes dead and it boots up again and the time is wrong. And then after a second, it connects to the Wi Fi time on your motherboard People that have server infrastructure, And Hey, you crack it open. JS there any asking? There's a little battery in it. And often if you buy something, they're only the ones that saved. If you buy, like, an old computer or, like, I Follow this TikTok account where this guy bought a video vending machine that wouldn't boot up, and it was just a little coin cell battery February 17 or February 94. Yeah. Right? And You might not. And those are the kind of bugs that you don't necessarily catch because it works on my machine, you know, especially once you're in browser land.

very commonplace because you do that Node. You change I'm not sure what the Toronto time zone stamp is, but there's a whole list of

Something with the time got goofed up

that are connected to the Internet, if you need to get our editor, Chris, will tell you He lives in Saskatchewan,

a head unit in our car and every now and pnpm, Jeff. In my mind, that's where it gets most of it. What else? Your device time. If you're not connected to the Internet, that's another thing I was trippy. Like, where does that come from? The little battery

all of my stats were, like, 3 hours off,

Nope. In your days. I haven't either. Okay.

that keeps

and I'm pretty sure it was because The actual box I was running on was moved Standards in there. And then you can also specify which calendar

before SSL certificates on the motherboard.

The date on your computer or, like, I booted up an old MacBook yesterday, and I hadn't booted it on for probably 2 years,

from one location to another. One interesting thing to to to note here about time, I don't know if you've ever pirated Stuff. That

SSL certificates,

for most devices in a different time Node. It will tell you my birthday is on

time it is currently.

on your computer. Node in the day, I guess they still have this. But if you open up a motherboard

And, you know, even then, you need to know, like, where your users Yarn, time zones.

NTP protocols, and it will always return to you

I don't know if this is still the case, but the Game Bos games back in the day or was it the NES games?

they require the correct time. Mhmm. Logging and saving data. If you have A log or errors and exceptions. Right? Use century dot I o. That tells you when something happened. When something happened is very important if you're trying to fix it. If it happened last week or last year, it has 2 columns on my calendar which calendar for 14 years from now.

Adobe software hour 0301 But before we get into that, this is episode number 720.

different answers

A lot of electronics going awry is either a, a 10 set fuse.

back in

it's pinging one of those. There might be something with the WiFi router where it gets it from that. I'm not totally sure, but

So time is extremely important in programming in general to be able to fix the things that are broken or to understand what's going on when and where.

while your computer is disconnected or not. So so every now and then, that battery will die, or you have to replace it. You have to reset the actual time on your motherboard, which is wild. Yeah. That is wild.

somewhere close to you, And you want to put that on your calendar. I might give you a UTC date stamp of Yes.

a couple of years ago back when I used to just have a digital ocean box.

the correct time that is based off of one of those atomic clocks. So that's how most

But also, like, and that's that's where we're at today.

to convert it to the epoch time, Peace. Head on over to syntax.fm specifying what time is. Right? Yes. And it's issued by the International Organization

It's crazy. So

Get time. Yeah, it works fine. So the browsers have been updated for this Y2K bug.

a new date in JavaScript is not a value. Right? day after day for everybody and doing just such an amazing job. You know, this podcast wouldn't be the same without out Chris, and it wouldn't have gotten here without Chris. So I I wanna give a just a a sincere thank you to Chris And all of his his hard work, For that, has it? Let's see. JavaScript numbers, including those representing epoch time, are stored as 16 bit

The epoch time was represented as

And if your epoch, time storing was a 32 bit integer.

eight

2038.

So get ready. Something to put in your, Now epoch time is a really useful way to store time because it's just a number. It's an integer.

you know, if you're wanting to save a date to a database and have it be accessed somewhere else later, a really, really sincere thank you to Chris Enns for doing such a an amazing job Jeff. Editing our podcast What what exactly you're asking for. Because when you do does it fix the JavaScript

Jeff. Causing your epoch times to all break. And since then, many systems what the heck's that doing?

have become 64 bit integers to define epoch time. That is a, a little bit of a a y two k problem that I've never heard about before until recently.

Hey, 2Doo. Although, like, the older I get, the faster time goes. So I think it's gonna come up on us real quick. The older I get, the faster time goes for sure. Absolutely. That's the thing.

JavaScript has been updated

which, again, the number of seconds elapsed since January 1st who knows what.

In some points,

Floating point numbers. This allows yes. So JavaScript is fine. I'm gonna try it right now. So const date is equal to new date, January 22nd and that will but, like, I guess that's how clocks work, but that would not be my first guess.

on January 19, 2038, And it fixed.

Tolinski.

Boss, and Scott, El Toro Loco,

Welcome to Syntax on this Monday Sanity treat.

Monday. Monday. Monday. Open wide dev fans. Get ready to stuff your face with JavaScript, CSS, node modules, barbecue tips, Git workflows, breakdancing,

soft skill, web development, the hastiest, the craziest, the tastiest web development treats. Coming in hot. Here is Wes, Barracuda,