Found 3 results in Tales from a Developer

In Canada and the US, the vast majority of provinces, states, and territories observe daylight savings time. We are scheduled to change our clocks on Sunday, November 1, 2026, falling back by 1 hour at 2:00am.

However, on March 2 of this year, the province of British Columbia decided not to observe any more time changes starting on November 1, staying on permanent daylight savings time. On June 18, Alberta made the same decision. And most recently, on September 17th, Manitoba decided to follow this precedent and will likewise stay on daylight savings permanently, starting this November. 

This created some work for content editors and website developers in those provinces, and what should have been a simple update ended up requiring some investigation. Here's the story of why event calendars started to display the wrong time for events, and how we fixed it.

This year, two Canadian provinces, BC and Alberta, moved to make Daylight Saving Time permanent. This created an issue with event registrations for some of our library clients, an interesting technical solution, and the potential for future implications down the road as other provinces (and the US) potentially join the trend. This and more in August’s Mugo Digest!

When things go seriously wrong in a well-built but complicated system, the cause is often a cascade of small failures that pile up. Not that we’re building rockets over here, but an excellent example is the ill-fated Ariane flight V88. Solving the issues behind such failures can be problematic. Many things contribute to the difficulty, from the extensive use of caching to the need to convincingly reconstruct the failure in retrospect. Debugging this kind of failure, especially under pressure, is hard. We consider the ability to do this to be the hallmark of a senior developer. Even so, it is essential to have a team of experts working together to troubleshoot issues and find solutions promptly to help keep your site running.