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Jon Skeet
Personal blog · codeblog.jonskeet.ukprogramming
Jon Skeet's personal blog at codeblog.jonskeet.uk covers programming. Since 2014, 80 different Hacker News readers have linked it 122 times, most often “Storing UTC is not a silver bullet”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-14, and you can follow it by feed.
Most-linked posts?
- Storing UTC is not a silver bullet24 people · 27 mentions · first linked 2019-03-27
- Writing the perfect question (2010)6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2016-09-15
- Stack Overflow question checklist (2012)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-01-19
- All about java.util.Date3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-04-23
- The Open-Closed Principle is poorly described3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-05-07
- A Tour of the .NET Functions Framework2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-10-23
- No, the bug is in your code (and mine)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-10-23
- Versioning Limitations in .Net2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-06-30
- Diversity and speaking engagements2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-12-10
- Stack Overflow Culture - Jon Skeet2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-03-17
What Hacker News says?
It's not sufficient in many cases, especially when scheduling things that you expect to happen at a specific local time. https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2019/03/27/storing-utc-is-not-a...
Comment linking /2019/03/27/storing-utc-is-not-a-silver-bullet/
on “US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent”Submitted Storing UTC is not a silver bullet as a story · 304 points
HN discussionIn addition to the other replies, I defer to the great Jon Skeet: https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2019/03/27/storing-utc-is-not-a...
Comment linking /2019/03/27/storing-utc-is-not-a-silver-bullet/
on “Things I learnt the hard way in thirty years of software development”Submitted Stack Overflow Culture as a story · 264 points
HN discussionThis is very much not true. There are good cases for both. John Skeet, who knows more about this topic than anybody I can think of, wrote a blog post that explained it well: https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2019/03/27/storing-utc-is-not-a...
Comment linking /2019/03/27/storing-utc-is-not-a-silver-bullet/
on “Things I learnt the hard way in thirty years of software development”Submitted Storing UTC is not a silver bullet (2019) as a story · 243 points
HN discussion[John Skeet] ( https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/ ) C#'s transcedence lord
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Which developers do you closely follow?”Submitted All about java.util.Date as a story · 195 points
HN discussionFirst example I've checked is wrong [1]. Shuffle a list, with a static Random object initialization. Using a static random object is not thread-safe in .NET. "One common solution is to use a static field to store a single instance of Random and reuse it. That’s okay in Java (where Random is thread-safe) but it’s not so good in .NET – if you use the same instance repeatedly from .NET, you can corrupt the internal dat…
Comment linking /2009/11/04/revisiting-randomness
on “Programming Idioms”Submitted Diagnosing a Linux-only unit test failure as a story · 70 points
HN discussionRelated: Jon Skeet blogged about the concept of programming "in" a language vs programming "into" a language back in 2008. https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2008/04/23/programming-quot-in-...
Comment linking /2008/04/23/programming-quot-in-quot-a-language-vs-programming-quot-into-quot-a-language/
on “Think in Math, Write in Code”Submitted Unexpected inconsistency in records as a story · 61 points
HN discussionPython gets love for a number of choices it made right early on, and that its core langauge is obviously well thought out. Even very old Python is generally readable and clear; except for some colons, it looks like pseudo-code. This is the same reason I think Java gets a lot of respect: they had a few core language design ideas and built the language around them. People will say COBOL's syntax is horribly verbose, b…
Comment linking /2017/04/23/all-about-java-util-date/
on “25 Years of PHP”Submitted Storing UTC is not a silver bullet (2019) as a story · 46 points
HN discussionDifferent prompts/approaches? I "grew up", as it were, on StackOverflow, when I was in my early dev days and didn't have a clue what I was doing I asked question after question on SO and learned very quickly the difference between asking a good question vs asking a bad one There is a great Jon Skeet blog post from back in the day called "Writing the perfect question" - https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2010/08/29/writing…
Comment linking /2010/08/29/writing-the-perfect-question/
on “Gemini 3.0 spotted in the wild through A/B testing”Submitted Stack Overflow Culture - Jon Skeet as a story · 31 points
HN discussionIn your support: https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2019/03/27/storing-utc-is-not-a...
Comment linking /2019/03/27/storing-utc-is-not-a-silver-bullet/
on “JavaScript dates are about to be fixed”Submitted When Abstractions Break as a story · 30 points
HN discussionIt's long, and has examples in C#, but this article by Jon Skeet should instill some healthy doubt in your convictions: https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2019/03/27/storing-utc-is-not-a...
Comment linking /2019/03/27/storing-utc-is-not-a-silver-bullet/
on “JavaScript dates are about to be fixed”Submitted Writing the perfect question (2010) as a story · 27 points
HN discussionThis is for .NET, but the issues described stand for any stack: https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2019/03/27/storing-utc-is-not-a...
Comment linking /2019/03/27/storing-utc-is-not-a-silver-bullet/
on “JavaScript dates are about to be fixed”Submitted DigMixer: Protocols as a story · 22 points
HN discussionThis also reminds me of the post Jon Skeet wrote about using UTC: https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2019/03/27/storing-utc-is-not-a... Also discussed on HN back in the days: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19500640
Comment linking /2019/03/27/storing-utc-is-not-a-silver-bullet/
on “Timezone Bullshit”Submitted Introduction to Digimixer as a story · 16 points
HN discussionGoing a little further, what I'd really like to see is the core concepts implemented in a way that allows a standard implementation to follow straightforwardly from the type system, but also allow for doing nonstandard things. Like, "here's a logic language built in" is kind of boring. What's more enticing is "Here are the components. Here's a nominal implementation based on these components. Here's a weird thing yo…
Comment linking /2011/06/22/eduasync-part-13-first-look-at-coroutines-with-async/
on “Flix – A powerful effect-oriented programming language”Submitted OMG Ponies (Aka Humanity: Epic Fail) (2009) as a story · 15 points
HN discussionThe problem with SOLID is not SOLID, it's the fetishism that sometimes surrounds it. I get it, rules are attractive as they make everything easier. You put on blinders and follow the track. But the fact that there's so much disagreement about how to best build software, with valid arguments in all sides of the multiple spectra, should hint at its truer nature as a craft (some would say a philosophy, but I haven't ye…
Comment linking /2013/03/15/the-open-closed-principle-in-review/
on “CUPID – the back story”Submitted Diagnosing weird problems – a Stack Overflow case study (2012) as a story · 15 points
HN discussion> OP says to always store a timezone with each date Jon Skeet talked about this once. https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2019/03/27/storing-utc-is-not-a... What I take is convert everything to UTC is fine if it's historical data, even unix timestamp is fine. However for the future datetime, it's more complicated than that.
Comment linking /2019/03/27/storing-utc-is-not-a-silver-bullet/
on “Database Design for Google Calendar: A Tutorial”Submitted When is a string not a string? as a story · 12 points
HN discussion
