Okay, so today I wanna chat about something I messed around with recently: Julian Williams. No, not the boxer, something else entirely.
I was kicking around, trying to figure out a decent way to handle some date stuff in a project. You know, converting dates, figuring out days between, that kinda jazz. And I stumbled upon this thing called the Julian Day Number. Apparently, it’s been around forever, like since the 16th century or something crazy like that.
First thing I did was dive into trying to understand the whole concept. It’s basically just a continuous count of days since a specific starting date. It sounded simple enough, but getting my head around the formulas to convert regular dates to Julian Day Numbers was a bit of a pain. I found a bunch of different formulas online, some were super complicated, some were a bit easier to read. I grabbed a few, and started plugging in dates to see if they matched up with the online calculators. It was a lot of trial and error, let me tell you.
Then, I started hacking together some code. I decided to use Python ’cause it’s what I’m most comfortable with these days. I wrote a function to take a year, month, and day, and spit out the Julian Day Number. I kept comparing my results to those online calculators, and tweaking the code until everything lined up.
But just getting the Julian Day Number wasn’t enough. I needed to go the other way too. So, I tackled converting Julian Day Numbers back into regular dates. That was even more of a head-scratcher! More formulas, more tweaking. I felt like I was back in math class all over again.
Once I had those two functions working, I started thinking about what I could actually do with them. I built a little script that would calculate the number of days between two dates. I entered my birthday and today’s date, and boom, there it was. Pretty neat!
After that, I tried to make it a bit more practical. I integrated it into a small personal project where I needed to track deadlines. It’s not fancy or anything, but it gets the job done, and now I’m handling date calculations like a pro. Or, at least, a slightly more informed amateur. Still learning, still messing around. That’s the fun part, right?
So, yeah, that’s my Julian Williams adventure. It was a bit of a rabbit hole, but I learned some cool stuff about dates and got to flex my coding muscles a bit. Maybe next time I’ll try tackling the Modified Julian Date. Sounds like a party!
