Technology Gone Terribly... Right

I'm not an Amazon fan-boy.  I worked there as a contractor  for 8 months and still didn't start using Amazon in my personal life.  I may be forced to subscribe to Amazon Prime to get Dr. Who, but that will be very begrudgingly.

However, Amazon Web Services is a true gem in an otherwise frustrating field.  I worked with AWS for a 3 month stint about two years ago and had to use some AWS services at my current job (p.s. my Google+ job history is outdated) and getting both the Simple Notification Service and the Simple Storage Service only took me a day.  No real hassles, surprises or gotchas.

I usually write about how to deal with things going wrong, but for once I'm writing about something going right.

It isn't nearly as interesting, is it?

LocalDateTime Is Not Local!

No one ever has problems with Dates and Times!  (Y2k, 2038, 10,000)

Java8 dates and times were supposed to be a lot easier and designed by the Joda-Time guys.

One problem, after struggling for a full working day - LocalDateTimes are NOT Local!  Maybe in the sense of localized?  They are definitely UTC, not your local timezone.  Looking back at it, it says that it doesn't capture timezone information in the docs, but I didn't look at the docs because I thought that the name was blindingly obvious.

Copyright BBC

I was pulling my hair out when I wrote a function todayAt that returned a date that didn't register as today.  A time at 3:45 PM was being converted to 2 AM UTC (the next day) because LocalDateTime wasn't local.  I was looking for ZonedDateTime.

As they say, there are two hard things in Computer Science: caching, naming things and off by one errors.