PHPUGKA - 10. Nov. 2016
10 Nov 2016 at ping24/7 GmbH

Whether you think you work with timezones or not, you should hear this talk. It does not only cover how you should store time data, but also explains in depth why it's important to do so.

A lot of approaches to improve code and possible ways to reduce underestimated sources for bugs in development.

This talk expects you to know your PHP versions well. Every part of the talk is made out of experience and shouldn't be considered as a set of rules. Because I made many of the same experiences while fixing forwarded projects, I can suggest this talk to those who are trying to improve their coding skills and want to know different approaches for their code quality.

Finally got the chance to hear the whole talk. A long story of the timezones and a lot of tricky details are part of this talk, that is more than half a story and the rest of the time related to code and database. If you have to work with timezones, this talk is a good starting point for you.

It may be too long for those who want some quick facts about timezones or expect a "how to store timezone data", so be sure you really want to listen to all of the information Andreas has delivered in his talk.

Some interesting suggestions on how to shape your code and rules that might help you to achieve this. Clearly opinionated and I might not agree with all of them, but they are funded on experience. Therefore I liked that Marco specifically said that one should choose the rules which help best with the environment you find yourself in.

What I didn't like is that in-between it felt like a staccato of proposals which as a listener you can only take in but don't have enough time to process properly as the talk proceeds to the next one. As such, it is not suited for beginners, you need to have quite some experience to not get lost.

When you work with dates, times and timezones hearing this talk is a must. Great insight of why this is such a mess and how it should be handled so it doesn't become an even larger mess in your code.

Time wise it seemed a bit long too me. Maybe the introduction with history and basics should be more compressed, as in the end the PHP and databases part felt a bit rushed to stay within time.

Good overview over quirks and history of timezones along with some usage examples in PHP. Talk was imho a bit on the long side for a user group with roughly an hour, although all parts were interesting and useful.