2008-05-07 Four

Blogging 'bout work. Again.

This week I've got the most interesting task ever. I won't go much into detail, but it's got to do with time zones and daylight saving rules. UTC representing the continuous flow of time, NZST, NZDT, CEST, CET, GMT and all the others being the discontinuous bits and pieces mankind made out of it, guided by the illusion that a bright morning can make up for an early dark evening. While I've been designing, hacking away and testing ("make more mistakes faster", remember?), I learned two things:
Firstly, only the concept is simple. The actual conversion from UTC to local time (works always) and from local time to UTC (discontinuities!) is only trivial in theory, and sometimes a brute force inverse-of-inverse implementation is the way to go.
Secondly, I can only think so long about time zones before my brain starts to boil.

What makes this task so cool (apart from the obvious challenge of being so much more than just a simple bug fix) is that all I've been given is the draft of a specification, and a week of time. One week! That's ridiculously long, even enough to implement some testing! On Monday I asked questions and messed around with the design, on Tuesday and today I implemented the model and tested it (quite thoroughly, I must say), and tomorrow and Friday will be devoted to the GUI. I love my job!