Post Syndicated from Bozho original https://techblog.bozho.net/dont-reinvent-date-formats/

Microsoft Exchange has a bug that practically stops email. (The public sector is primarily using Exchange, so many of the institutions I’m responsible for as a minister, have their email “stuck”). The bug is described here, and fortunately, has a solution.

But let me say something simple and obvious: don’t reinvent date formats, please. When in doubt, use ISO 8601 or epoch millis (in UTC), or RFC 2822. Nothing else makes sense.

Certainly treating an int as a date is an abysmal idea (it doesn’t even save that much resources). 202201010000 is not a date format worth considering.

(As a side note, another advice – add automate tests for future timestamps. Sometiimes they catch odd behavior).

I’ll finish with Jon Skeet’s talk on dates, strings and numbers.

The post Don’t Reinvent Date Formats appeared first on Bozho's tech blog.