[tz] Leap year bugs

[Matt Johnson-Pint]

Hello Time People!  Apologies in advance, as I know this is a bit off-topic being not about time zones, but I know that many of you are invested in date and time programming, and I'd appreciate some peer discussion.

I've been invested in the last many months on preventative measures against leap year bugs, both in my day job at Microsoft and in the public space.  Some of my recent posts:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57530882/what-are-some-examples-of-leap-year-bugs

https://codeofmatt.com/on-the-life-cycle-of-a-leap-year-bug/

And from last leap year:

https://codeofmatt.com/list-of-2016-leap-day-bugs/

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/is-your-code-ready-for-the-leap-year/


Sometimes I feel like I'm overreacting, but then I remember the infamous 2012 Azure cloud leap day outage, and all the many other things across the industry that were impacted in 2016 (see my list above).

My question for the community is this:  Why are Y2K and Y2038 bugs such a hot topic when they are/were one-time events, but yet leap year bugs are rarely discussed even though they are recurring and can have critical impact?  People seem to remember 20 years ago, but not 4 or 8 years back.  Why?

Are any of you working on leap year related issues?  Have you checked your date math for leap year bugs? If not, why?

Thanks,
Matt
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/attachments/20200122/cd938f8f/attachment.html>