About 1337 Clock

The story behind the spite-driven guide to time in software

🎮 The Origin Story

It started as a joke. A simple website that checked if it was 13:37 (leet o'clock) in different timezones. But like all good jokes about time in software, it quickly became a nightmare of edge cases, DST transitions, and timezone database updates.

What began as "haha, it's 1337 somewhere" evolved into a comprehensive guide to all the ways time can destroy your code, ruin your day, and make you question your career choices. Because if you're going to suffer through timezone hell, you might as well learn something.

"It's 13:37 somewhere" is the perfect Trojan horse to teach developers about time standards, DST transitions, and all the gnarly edges that trip us up.

🎯 Our Mission

Educate Through Pain

Learn from the collective suffering of developers who've been burned by time. Real bugs, real disasters, real solutions.

Practical Tools

Interactive playgrounds to explore DST transitions, format parsing, and timezone conversions safely.

Code Examples

Battle-tested patterns and anti-patterns across multiple programming languages. Copy-paste solutions that actually work.

Community Wisdom

Crowdsourced time crimes and solutions from developers who've lived to tell the tale. Share your horror stories.

⚠️ Why Time is Hard

1

Timezones Change

Politicians decide to change timezone rules. Your code breaks. The IANA timezone database updates, but your system doesn't.

2

DST is Evil

Twice a year, time jumps forward or backward. Some hours don't exist. Some hours happen twice. Your cron jobs vanish.

3

Standards Conflict

ISO 8601, RFC 3339, POSIX time, Windows time zones. Everyone has their own idea of how time should work.

4

Naive Assumptions

"Just store it as a string." "Local time is fine." "Timezones don't matter." Famous last words before production breaks.

📖 The Book

"It's 13:37 Somewhere: A Spite-Driven Guide to Timezones"

The comprehensive guide to surviving time in software. 12 chapters of battle-tested wisdom, real-world examples, and the collective pain of developers worldwide.

  • ✅ Real bug postmortems and solutions
  • ✅ Code examples in Python, JavaScript, Go, Java
  • ✅ Evil test cases to break your assumptions
  • ✅ Operations playbook for DST transitions
  • ✅ API design patterns that don't suck
📚
Coming Soon
Digital + Print

🙏 Credits & Thanks

Built With

  • • Nuxt 3 & Vue.js
  • • Tailwind CSS
  • • Day.js for time handling
  • • IANA timezone database
  • • Spite and caffeine

Inspiration

  • • Every developer burned by DST
  • • The IANA timezone maintainers
  • • Stack Overflow time questions
  • • Production incidents at 2:30 AM
  • • The collective pain of our industry

Made with ❤️ and 😤 by developers who've been there.
"Friends don't let friends use naive datetimes."