Fuzzy dates aren't as good an idea as you think

This post is more than 8 years old.

Posted at 08:00 on 29 February 2016

I received an e-mail from a colleague the other day about some code that I’d recently pushed to GitHub. Since I’d pushed some more changes round about the time he sent the e-mail, I needed to know which revision he was referring to.

There’s just one problem:

image

Of course, I could have got the proper times from SourceTree or typing git log in the console, but it’s still annoying, especially since the GitHub page was more easily to hand. And GitHub does show you the exact time as a tooltip—something I missed at the time—but it’s still annoying, especially if you have to hover over half a dozen different datestamps to find the one you’re looking for.

We need to have a rethink about fuzzy dates. Yes, I know that it’s friendly and cuddly and warm and fuzzy and cute (and more interesting to code) to say “two days ago” or “eighteen hours ago,” but when I’m trying to refer back to 17:22 precisely, it’s utterly useless and just adds friction without providing any value whatsoever.