The problem
I saw the strangest artifact today while reviewing the pages on my site. The dates of my posts were off. The months and years were correct, but every single post said I wrote it on the sixth day of the month. I couldn’t figure it out, but I knew it had something to do with the date format.
Unlike most computer programming languages, Go has an intuitive date format.
Many computer languages use variations of C’s strftime syntax.
In C syntax, the conventional American date format of “January 6, 2006”
is represented by %B %d, %Y.
Other programming languages have similarly arcane representations.
Go’s date formatting is much easier. In Go, the American date format
is represented with January 6, 2006. It’s so simple that I couldn’t see
where I went wrong. But if you know Go, you probably saw my error immediately.
It was the date I used.
The solution
Go requires a specific date: January 2, 2006. I had mistakenly typed January 6, which caused all my dates to be the sixth of the month.
I doubt many people will make this mistake, but I’m memorializing it for when I do it again.