Unsolicited Dating Advice

A lightning talk about dates—the calendar kind. Born from the blog post of the same name, delivered to an audience holding pitchforks.

• Credentials first. Born in England, raised in Israel, metric all the way down—objective enough to say it: the American date format is better.
• Day-first (the "Main Street" format) reads smallest-to-largest, which is logically tidy and practically backwards: "18" means nothing until you reach the month, and then your brain backtracks. The day lives inside the month—telling someone "your keys are in the green box" before mentioning the cabinet.
• Month-first is janky-looking but sets context immediately, then zooms in with surgical precision. Information ordered by importance to the user rather than importance to the system.
• ISO 8601 gets points for linear progression, then loses them: the year is usually useless context. Nobody starts zooming from Earth. In daily use we omit the year entirely—at which point month-first wins outright.
• The scoreboard: the "best" format ranks last on usability, and America's formerly laughable one was, accidentally, designed with users in mind. The rest of the argument—including a proposed format—lives in the blog post, findable because "my SEO is dope."