Show HN: Keep track of Daylight Saving Time changes around the world

summertime.today

4 points·nicolaslem··3 comments

This is a pet project I have been developing to solve a very simple problem I have.

I wear a wrist watch with world time feature. I don't often need to know the time in another country, but each time I did the time was off by one hour.

All countries manage DST as they wish, as it's mostly a political choice. So I figured out that the best way to be sure to have the correct time worldwide was to receive an email each time a country toggles DST.

As I couldn't find an existing service doing that I made this website. It is built with Django and Celery. I will open source it once I will get rid of a few non-Free CSS and JS bits.

So how do you know when a country toggles DST? Where are you getting that information from?

Do you have plans to have an api for this so that you could connect this with IFTTT or Zapier? This would open up many possibilities such as receiving a notification or an sms instead of an email when a country toggles DST.

I get this information from the IANA timezone database shipped with pytz. With it you can easily detect when a TZ changes its time because of toggling DST on or off.

I was thinking about an API as well, I will probably add RSS, webhooks and a simple REST API.

The thing is, I'm not sure the API will be used much. Most systems already have access to the same TZ database I use, so why make an HTTP call to retrieve this information?

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