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The worst I have ever messed up during an interview was building a simple booking system that had to do recurring appointments. I never felt that lost and confused trying to accomplish something in code since my early university days lol

To this day whenever I have to work with anything datetime related I dread it, it just does not click in my head for some reason

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Asking a design question like "Design a booking system, but with recurring appointments" is like asking "Write a function to order a list of string, but it has to work with arbitrary UTF-8 strings, in any locale, respecting alphabetical order conventions". It's a deceptively simple question that gets impossibly hairy if you try to make it work in a real-world, general, way.

(As someone who hires) the correct answer to any question involving datetimes is always "use a [good] library - do not attempt to reimplement all of human civilization from scratch".

Don’t feel bad about it. I was tasked with improving a calendar in a CMS to support a bunch more functions, and basically eaten alive by it. I had 8yrs of experience or so by then.

It is deceptively hard and requires excellent data modeling skills.

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