I don't like daylight savings

I have to say I'm not a fan of daylight savings. As someone who works with computer software I'm well aware of the absolute hell that is involved in making software work properly with daylight savings. Because of the entirely arbitrary nature of the dates where daylight savings starts and ends it is a very difficult task to make computer software that actually gets the displayed time correct. If you want to make your systems be able to always get the local time correct you effectively need a way to get updates about the time zone changes as they happen. Having to enable some form of updating introduces complexities, do you connect your system to the internet to get updates on time changes (via NTP or similar) from some external server? Do you update your software automatically? All these things that have to be introduced to deal with time have their own problems and significantly add to the complexity of deployment which creates a larger attack surface for security issues with your products.

But all the extreme cost that's imposed on the software engineering world I think is minor compared to the cost imposed on everyone from the worse health outcomes that the daylight savings transition causes via the stress it creates on peoples minds and bodies from fucking with their sleep cycles. Dealing with daylight savings time in software just makes a bunch of software engineers miserable but removing an hour of sleep in this manner makes everyone miserable.

Turns out that that, like everyone else¹, if I can get in a regular habit with sleeping and waking times that fits with society then life is a whole lot easier. Getting a consistent sleep pattern in place comes with great benefits. For me I have always found daylight savings to be an especially hideous time of year because my entire life I have had a battle with a sleeping issue that makes consistent sleeping cycles hard for me to establish.

So I was starting to settle into a nice rhythm that fit well with my work and then I get my twice yearly disruption from daylight savings which has immediately pushed me out of a natural sleeping and waking cycle. Unfortunately it takes much longer for this to stabilize than just missing an hour of sleep for some other reason. Having that hour of sleep disappear has made me feel like complete shit today and probably will make me feel worse than usual for this entire upcoming week. Because some of my work is remote I'll get more disruptions to my schedule when other places move to daylight savings, unfortunately this isn't just all done on one day, the times change on various calendar dates, or not at all like is the case in Western Australia and Queensland.

With what we know about how consistent circadian rhythms are for good sleep and the importance of good sleep for good health I think the costs of daylight savings are enormous.