As programmers occasionally we run into things that should be so simple and common that we don’t even think twice about them. Two of the most egregious are time and people names. A matching pair of articles (by different authors) address these with some fairly broad lists. Check out the original posts for full credit, but they are reproduced here for compilation and history’s sake. The fact is names are hard, and time is the most annoying thing since printers.

I have tried several date formats; the only thing for certain is that the USA-variability of month/day/year, day/month/year, etc is a really annoying. Today I discovered Julian dates: forget about the month altogether! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_date#Day_and_year_only This makes great sense, especially for calculating when my packages are set to arrive! Now if only I could figure out my birthday in it… date "+%Y%j" 2020185