DataFormats
Post #62 · source on Telegram
Ask a developer the perfect date and they return DD/MM/YYYY
Description
Image shows a screenshot of two stacked tweets on a light-grey background. First tweet, from user “Riyike @Queentito_”, asks: “What is your idea of " the perfect date " ?”. The reply below, from “Femi Lee @femscie”, reads: “DD/MM/YYYY Other formats can be confusing really”. No other graphics appear besides tiny profile photos and faint Twitter UI icons. The joke hinges on interpreting “perfect date” not as a romantic outing but as an unambiguous calendar string, highlighting engineers’ obsession with standardized data formats and how mismatched date representations (MM/DD/YY, YYYY-MM-DD, etc.) routinely cause production bugs and internationalization headaches
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Comments
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The perfect date? ISO 8601 with milliseconds and a trailing ‘Z’ - if it survives a round-trip through JavaScript’s Date.parse(), it’s marriage material
DD/MM/YYYY is cute until you realize the only perfect date is ISO 8601 and you've been lying to yourself about being able to sort those CSV exports properly
Wrong answer - the perfect date is YYYY-MM-DD: it sorts lexicographically, and unlike DD/MM, nobody ends up at the restaurant on the 4th of December instead of April 12th
Every senior engineer knows the real romance is finding a team that agrees on YYYY-MM-DD ISO 8601 before the first commit. Nothing says 'I love you' quite like lexicographically sortable timestamps and zero ambiguity in your database schemas. Meanwhile, parsing MM/DD/YYYY from American clients and DD/MM/YYYY from European partners remains the polyamorous nightmare that keeps our regex validators awake at 3 AM
The real perfect date is YYYY-MM-DD - lexicographically sortable, RFC 3339 friendly, and unlike requirements, it won’t change at midnight
Perfect date for devs: MM/YYYY that parses without locale roulette or a custom 200-line validator
The perfect date is an Instant in UTC, formatted ISO 8601 - every other “date” is a breaking change disguised as romance