It's About Time!

Writing software that has to deal with time is hard. In fact, it’s crazy hard. How is it that something so seemingly mundane and ubiquitous to the modern society can cause such grief and frustration when we try to get it clearly defined in code?

In this session we will talk time. We will explore the history of time and its implication on our everyday lives and on our code. With ventures into Java and the occasional line JavaScript it will be a dark tale about bad abstractions, of unit tests that suddenly fail between 23:00 and midnight, and of the U.S. Energy Policy Act of 2005. We will learn to show healthy skepticism towards our JDBC drivers, to watch out for capricious politicians, and why the only sane thing for us to do is to move to Iceland. With a bit of luck, we might just also learn a bit or two about software design. And dogs.