Matt Johnson specializes in the subject of dates and times in computing, including time zones and daylight saving time. He is a core team member of Moment.js, the leading date-time library for JavaScript, and regularly contributes to other time-related projects including Noda-Time for .NET, and the IANA Time Zone Database. Matt is also the author of "Date and Time Fundamentals", a 6-hour long video course available on Pluralsight. In his day job, Matt works at Microsoft on the Azure cloud platform. He also spends a lot of his time advising other groups at Microsoft on time zone concerns. You can find Matt answering Stack Overflow questions for the datetime and timezone tags, or check out his blog at codeofmatt.com.
Chapters:
- - Dave introduces the show and Matt Johnson
- - How Matt got so interested in dates and times
- - The (misguided) idea of doing away with time zones and using "UTC Everywhere"
- - The downsides of Daylight Saving Time
- - The nature of dates and times in space exploration and an interplanetary future and relating that to ships at sea
- - The nature of the date/time geek community
- - Getting involved in projects making dates and times work better in computing and Stack Overflow as a source of opportunity
- - The human element of community and making connections
- - The things that "light Matt up"
- - Matt's story of failure - A project that wasn't properly planned and budgeted and didn't launch
- - Matt's life at Microsoft and tooling to support code analysis and identifying good and not-so-good practices
- - Matt success story - Enabling automatic time zone detection and aligning time zones in Windows to the Microsoft mission statement
- - How Matt stays current with what he needs to know
- - Matt's book recommendation
- - The things that have Matt most excited
- - Matt's sources of pain and suffering
- - Matt's top 3 tips for delivering more value
- - Keeping up with Matt
Resources:
- Matt's Blog
- Matt on Stack Overflow
- Matt on Pluralsight
- Moment.js
- Noda Time
- IANA Time Zone Database
- The radical plan to destroy time zones - Washington Post
- More on Why Abolishing Time Zones Is a Bad Idea
- Startdate in Star Trek
- Star Wars Galactic Standard Calendar
- Lord Howe Island
- Jeremy Clark on Developer On Fire
- Jon Skeet on Developer On Fire
- RavenDB
- Maggie Pint
- Site Reliability Engineering at Google
- Microsoft's Mission Statement
- Scott Hanselman on Imposter Syndrome
- Scott Hanselman on Developer On Fire
Matt's book recommendation:
Matt's top 3 tips for delivering more value:
- Get involved in open source
- Make sure you're respectful and inclusive of others at all times
- Don't be afraid to break the rules