You can now set your timezone in your Degen.club preferences. Select “Profile” from the dropdown menu under your name in the upper right hand side, and you will see an option to change from the default “Eastern time”.

Now let’s talk a bit about how the sausage is made. You might think that timezone is not such a big deal. That would seem to be something lots of sites deal with, and it is just a matter of adjusting relative so there should be ways to do it easily in code.

All true. But as with everything that can be done, I make choices about what will be done first. And when I launched back in 2024, I was much most concerned about having multiple contest types available for the start of the NFL season than anything else. And one of those things was timezones.

So I did not do anything about that, and the game times for the NFL was all based on Eastern time, where most of my users were going to be.

Turned out that I wound up having users in Chicago, Las Vegas, and other points west. My bad.

But I had made the choice and it was going to take some time to address it in the future. Software folks call this “technical debt”. Like all debt, it grows over time. Every thing I added to the site also had time involved, some more than others - like propositions and post times.

Post times in props is even trickier - because now in addition to translating what users get back from the Degen.club, you also have to balance what users send to Degen.club.

I was able to address the change over this past weekend, though, and large language models helped a great deal. I had been meaning to check out something like Cursor or Devin, and I wound up using Cursor to do what I wanted.

I can contrast this directly with currency formatting, which I also did this year, back in June. That was not difficult but I did have to systematically walk through all the code and site output and look for currency usage. Cursor was a lot faster than I was, and it was also able to make the code changes. I just reviewed and tested.

Cursor did miss some date outputs where I was using raw output from the data base to show things in Y-m-d format, but overall it was much faster than my manual brute force approach.

But I may have missed some things. So if you change your timezone, and you see anything that looks like it may not be adjusted, please let me know!