Kip Cole on Time, Localization and Building Agenda

<p>The Navajo Nation inside Arizona observes daylight saving. The Hopi reservation inside the Navajo Nation skips it again. There&#39;s a corner of the Yucatan Peninsula that takes 20 minutes to drive through and costs you an hour on your sat nav. No compiler warns you about any of this.</p><p>Kip Cole has spent 10 years building the Elixir libraries that handle what software gets wrong about human reality: localization, time, and scheduling. CLDR/ex_cldr gave the ecosystem 173,000 Unicode characters and locale-aware formatting for numbers, dates, currencies, and units. Tempo remodelled time as an interval instead of an instant. And this week, Agenda shipped - the scheduling engine four years in the making.</p><p>Topics include:</p><ul><li><p>why localization is not translation - the three things that go wrong in an e-commerce search before a single word has been mistranslated</p></li><li><p>the 10-year weekend project: how a localization library for Elixir turned into 28 packages and a full rewrite into Localized</p></li><li><p>why compile-time code generation with Elixir macros hit a wall - 1,000+ function clauses and quadratic compile times - and why moving to runtime fixed it</p></li><li><p>the astronomical algorithms scar: three years of learning a new branch of mathematics to implement calendar software the BEAM was never designed for</p></li><li><p>what Tempo makes explicit that everyone does by accident: time as an interval, not an instant</p></li><li><p>why scheduling is just set intersection over everyone&#39;s free and busy intervals - and why that single insight collapses almost every hard scheduling problem</p></li><li><p>how &quot;sometime on Tuesday&quot; is not a time but a domain error - and what Tempo forces you to say instead</p></li><li><p>Unicode version 18, 173,000 human language characters, and why most language ecosystems still can&#39;t represent them correctly</p></li><li><p>the difference between CLDR (the Unicode standard) and Localized (the Elixir implementation of it)</p></li><li><p>what Agenda actually ships this week and what&#39;s next</p></li></ul><p>Recorded September 8th, 2026.</p>