> Since we release on a 6 month cadence, we’re starting to name releases by season and year, which means our next release is now CockroachDB Spring ‘19.
Ugh. You'd think the creators of a multiregion database would realise half the planet has Autumn the same time as the other half has Spring.
> It also eliminates the mental gymnastics needed to figure out how old a release is
Best thing about moving to the US was that all those phrases "coming summer 2019" actually make sense! In Australia we don't really use seasons as references (the seasons aren't as distinct as they are here) - and because they were then flipped as well I never really thought they had a real meaning.
I guess I must have known they did have a real meaning, but my "consumer" grasp of them was more like vague marketing fluff that meant "will probably be out eventually"!
As a Polish person, my brain hates these too, even though we have proper seasons here. When I see "coming in the Spring", my mind is all "that's 20-ish of March, I think... or maybe April... no, December is definitely winter, so it must be March!".
Seasons are dumb. I remember reading a rant on the Internet once that advocated that we should recognize two seasons - summer and winter. You could put the boundary at equinoxes, with summer encompassing both traditional summer and spring, and winter encompassing traditional autumn and winter. The definition would be simple: summer is when it's kind of warm most of the time, winter is when it's kind of cold most of the time. I remember this resonating with me much more than the traditional definition.
Going back to temporal coordinates, the older I get the more confident I am in feeling that, for terrestrial use, anything that's not an ISO 8601 date is garbage and should not be used.
> and winter encompassing traditional autumn and winter. The definition would be simple: summer is when it's kind of warm most of the time, winter is when it's kind of cold most of the time.
At least in the part of the US I'm from, we only used "Fall" for "Autumn", because colloquially it was already defined as a simple and pretty tight (but often slightly different each year) period: When the leaves on trees have changed color, but not yet all fallen off.
Not only that, but the seasons have different meanings to different people depending on where in the USA you live. In my hot and desert climate spring means late February, but in Minnesota it could mean mid-May.
When you see a season mentioned in American marketing it basically means they have no idea. If a company says "spring 2019" it could mean sometime in April, or on June 20, hours before the summer solstice.
A JPL intern from Spain basically told me that the day end when sunset in Spain, it's very easy there. In California sunset can be around 5 pm and that's too weird for her. From the a quick google look, it seems like Spain daylight start from 6am or 7am and end around 8 or 9 pm. It's super interesting.
Well Spain's time is a bit weird because they use CET which is most appropriate for like Sweden and the Czech Republic and the countries slightly east or west of them. Even France's use of CET is more about integration with their eastern neighbors than about having the sun the highest at 12 pm.
Great except a bunch of places are tropical and thus don’t have four seasons as you experience it.
Thailand technically has three and people only really reference one (“winter”)
Also, I know “summer” means you get more leeway on when to actually release but is “mid year” or “late 2019” or “around November” really that hard, especially given that from what I hear, your seasons all start on weird dates?? (In Australia seasons officially start on the first of a given month)
India officially has four seasons, but they are winter, summer, monsoon and post-monsoon (autumn). Depending on the place, the year may also have six seasons of two months each. [1] In general conversations, you may find people talking about summer and winter, with a sprinkling of rainy season, and not much about others.
So any definition that goes by some restricted American version (as pointed out by people living in the U.S. here) of seasons is not really applicable to 90% of the world's population. As you dig deeper into the climate of different countries, states/provinces, regions, etc., you may probably find your 90% figure drop to 10% or less.
> > Since we release on a 6 month cadence, we’re starting to name releases by season and year, which means our next release is now CockroachDB Spring ‘19.
> Ugh. You'd think the creators of a multiregion database would realise half the planet has Autumn the same time as the other half has Spring.
The season name will only be produced in marketing materials mainly targeting North America and Europe. The technical product will be named "19.1". The season name will not appear in an install.
> in marketing materials mainly targeting North America and Europe
Except that the rest of the world sees the exact same internet and the services are available online through the world wide web, something anybody from anywhere (barring cenorship) can see.
Even if Cockroach Labs delivers a different website to people outside North America and Europe that don't reference the seasons, the rest of the world will still manage to happen upon either those materials of other people who reference the naming scheme used by those materials.
Why not save the hassle and just not bother with the season naming at all? There's enough evidence from the comment section to show such a scheme was insufficiently thought through for an internationally-available product available online that likely has an international community of users who will very likely chat amongst themselves, referencing marketing material not intended for everybody's consumption.
I think the problem isn't the % of population that lives in a particular hemisphere, it's that the seasonal versioning scheme forces you to think about which hemisphere the software was created in. I'd say most users of an open source database would be aware that there is software being written in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand etc.
I'm not conding the spring/summer naming (personally I'd just leave it at january/june), but the bulk of the world's population lives in the northern hemisphere, and not by a little, by a lot.
Just adding context in case people thought the populations were roughly equivalent. It has bearing in the validity of choosing something the majority of people would understand.
Ugh. You'd think the creators of a multiregion database would realise half the planet has Autumn the same time as the other half has Spring.
> It also eliminates the mental gymnastics needed to figure out how old a release is
I guess not.