Don't forget the ancient proverb handed down to us from the original neckbeards:
"At some point in their career, every programmer must pass through the fires of timezone hell."
"At some point in their career, every programmer must pass through the fires of timezone hell."
(Esoteric software-engineering topics could make a wonderful video game, you know?)
It took a bit longer than I expected.
Along with the recommendation to never inventing your own cryptography, you should also never write your own date/time routines. Use well tested functions in your database or programming language libraries.
Anyway come feb 29th 2008 I get a call about some users were having issues. After not to long I figured out it was caused because of the leap year and his logic did not account for leap years. So I called them back and told them it would fix its self by tomorrow. I never actually bothered to fix the bug because a) I thought it was unlikely that the pos system would still be used in 4 years and b) the code was so bad in all areas that trying to fix anything had a good chance of breaking something else.
Lets just say that job was very character building