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Here's a bug that ships to production silently and only shows up half the year.
You build an "Add to calendar" link. You test it in winter, it's perfect. Come summer, every event lands an hour off, and nobody can reproduce it on demand because whether it breaks depends on the date.
The cause: the link stamps the time as UTC (a trailing Z on the timestamp), but the time you actually stored is local wall-clock. Google dutifully reads your local time as UTC and shifts it by the offset. In the UK that offset is zero in winter and one hour in summer under BST, so the bug stays hidden for months.
The fix is two parts. Drop the Z so the time is "floating" with no zone attached, and add &ctz=Europe/London to the URL so Google places the event in London and handles the BST/GMT switch itself. Now the time you typed is the time the user sees, all year.
The rule underneath it: a timestamp with no timezone is ambiguous, and the classic mistake is labelling a local time as UTC. Decide explicitly whether your digits are UTC or wall-clock, and never let one pose as the other.
The network for creativity
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⚠️ SCAM ALERT — Please Read Before Accepting Any Job Invitations ⚠️
I want to warn the Contra community about an active phishing scam targeting freelancers.
How it works:
You receive a message about a WordPress or development project (in my case from someone claiming to be from "HitBox Games")
They ask you to book a discovery call via a Calendly link
The link looks exactly like a real Calendly page — but it is FAKE and hosted on their own domain
The page shows a "Sign in with Google" button — if you click it, they capture your Google account access and can log into your Gmail from their side
I confirmed this by reviewing the page source code, which contains hidden malicious scripts that steal your data.
Red flags to watch for:
— The recruiter uses a Gmail address instead of a company email
— The Calendly link does NOT start with calendly.com
— They create urgency around booking quickly
Please be careful and always verify Calendly links before signing in with Google. Real Calendly links always start with calendly.com.
Stay safe everyone. 🙏
thanks! stay safe! 🙏
For this project, I was completely exhausted, my eyes hurting badly.
But I refused to leave it halfway.
The more I learn, the more I realize businesses don’t actually have an information problem.
They have a retrieval problem.
That’s the problem I stayed up all night thinking about in #n8n. 😪
I’m interested in building systems that actually make things run better with my automation engineering skills.
If you're interested in #AI, #automation, or just want to be part of my journey, hit the follow button and send a DM.
Somewhere in my notes app is a tiny product idea waiting to become real 📝
That’s why I’m joining the Google Stitch x Contra challenge.
The challenge runs May 27 to June 3 with a $10k prize pool. It’s open to designers, builders, founders, students, and anyone who wants to experiment turning rough ideas into something people can actually click through.
Incredible!
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