Blog
Short, practical pieces on scheduling across time zones, daylight saving, public holidays, and the date and time problems that catch out distributed teams and developers. New posts land regularly.
ClockOrbit is built around tools: converters, schedulers, calculators, and reference tables that answer a question in seconds. The blog is where the longer thinking goes. It covers the recurring problems behind those tools: scheduling fairly across continents, surviving daylight saving transitions, planning around the public holidays your calendar app ignores, and the date and time edge cases that quietly break software.
Every post is written by the engineer who builds the tools, kept practical, and published at a steady cadence rather than dumped in bulk. Where a post leans on a calculation, it links to the tool that does the work, so you can stop reading and start scheduling. For deeper reference material, browse the long-form guides; for a quick answer, head straight to the tools or the public holiday calendars.
Science · July 16, 2026 · 9 min read
The 24-hour day is an average, not a measurement. This walks the solar day and the equation of time, the star-based sidereal day almost four minutes shorter, why the Moon slowly lengthens the day, and why leap seconds keep UTC honest.
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Business · July 13, 2026 · 9 min read
A NET 30 written in business days can land more than six weeks after the invoice, and a global contract that says only "within 10 days" means different dates in different countries. Here is the mechanism, the holiday trap, and how to remove the ambiguity.
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Time & society · July 10, 2026 · 9 min read
Germany moved its clocks first in 1916 to save coal, and much of Europe and North America followed. The energy savings turned out to be thin, the spring transition carries a real health cost, and most countries never bothered. Here is why the twice-a-year ritual survives in the places that keep it.
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Development · July 7, 2026 · 9 min read
Almost every timestamp you meet is a single number of seconds since the start of 1970 in UTC. This explainer walks through why that date was chosen, why the value carries no time zone, why it ignores leap seconds, the seconds-versus-milliseconds mix-up, and the exact moment a 32-bit clock overflows in 2038.
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Astronomy · July 7, 2026 · 9 min read
One instant, two opposite seasons. The June solstice is the longest day north of the equator and the shortest south of it, and the cause is the 23.4 degree tilt, not distance from the Sun. Here is the exact 2026 moment, how day length swings from the equator to the Arctic Circle, and why the earliest sunrise does not land on the solstice.
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Development · July 6, 2026 · 10 min read
Since Python 3.9, zoneinfo makes correct daylight saving arithmetic a one-liner, but only if your datetimes are aware. This walks the naive-versus-aware split, the pytz offset that comes from 1883, converting to UTC for storage, gaps and folds, and a New York standup that silently runs an hour late after 8 March 2026.
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Development · July 3, 2026 · 10 min read
A Unix timestamp is a single integer: seconds since 1 January 1970 UTC. Understand it and a whole class of date bugs stops being mysterious. This covers the multiply-by-1000 unit trap with real numbers and the precise moment in January 2038 when a 32-bit clock jumps back to 1901.
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Remote Work · June 30, 2026 · 9 min read
Three teams spaced eight hours apart can cover the whole clock with nobody on a night shift. The trap is the handoff: a worked Manila, London, and San Francisco example shows exactly where one seam has no overlap and how to stop work falling through it.
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Development · June 24, 2026 · 10 min read
Spring forward eats an hour, autumn replays one, and a backup scheduled at 02:30 either never runs or runs into a charge applied twice. Here is the failure mechanism with real 2026 transition dates, how each scheduler reacts, and why running everything in UTC is the only durable fix.
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Development · June 21, 2026 · 8 min read
Most date bugs trace back to one early decision: how the time was written to the database. Here is the rule set, including why a future 09:00 standup must not be stored as a frozen UTC instant, and the worked example of how it drifts at the spring transition.
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Scheduling · June 20, 2026 · 9 min read
Three time zones rarely share a humane hour. Here is the overlap-window method for finding the slot that works for San Francisco, London, and Singapore at once, and how to rotate the pain fairly when no slot does.
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