Episode 184 | Matt Johnson - Time For Impact

Guest: Matt Johnson @mj1856 Matt Johnson talks with Dave Rael about being a date and time geek, contributing and connecting, being a Site Reliability Engineer, and delivering 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: 0:56 - Dave introduces the show and Matt Johnson4:50 - How Matt got so interested in dates and times7:09 - The (misguided) idea of doing away with time zones and using "UTC Everywhere"9:27 - The downsides of Daylight Saving Time12:00 - The nature of dates and times in space exploration and an interplanetary future and relating that to ships at sea16:46 - The nature of the date/time geek community19:29 - Getting involved in projects making dates and times work better in computing and Stack Overflow as a source of opportunity21:38 - The human element of community and making connections25:01 - The things that "light Matt up"27:17 - Matt's story of failure - A project that wasn't properly planned and budgeted and didn't launch32:26 - Matt's life at Microsoft and tooling to support code analysis and identifying good and not-so-good practices37:15 - Matt success story - Enabling automatic time zone detection and aligning time zones in Windows to the Microsoft mission statement40:14 - How Matt stays current with what he needs to know41:18 - Matt's book recommendation42:39 - The things that have Matt most excited43:25 - Matt's sources of pain and suffering46:04 - Matt's top 3 tips for delivering more value48:21 - Keeping up with Matt Resources: Matt's Blog Matt on Stack Overflow Matt on Pluralsight Moment.js Noda Time IANA Time Zone Database 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: Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems - Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, Niall Richard Murphy Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software - Eric Evans 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