Do You Have a Sec?

Or Even a Microsecond?

Two years ago Ocean & Cake helped redesign and launch Time.gov. Recently we were asked to widgetize the core of that code so that it can be embedded on other websites. The image you see in this post is from the Nist.gov site. The first embed of our widget. The frontend isn’t the sexiest piece of tech, but just behind the curtain is a magical world of nuclear clocks, the Unix Epoch (January 1, 1970), and one of the highest trafficked websites in the world.

Highlights:

• The nation’s primary frequency standard is a cesium fountain atomic clock developed at the NIST laboratories in Boulder, Colorado. A primary frequency standard contributes to the calibration of the official international time scale Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), and to its local realization UTC(NIST) which is synthesized and distributed from the NIST laboratories in Boulder.
• The Unix time 0 is exactly midnight UTC on 1 January 1970, with Unix time incrementing by 1 for every non-leap second after this. For example, 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1971 is represented in Unix time as 31536000. Negative values, on systems that support them, indicate times before the Unix epoch, with the value decreasing by 1 for every non-leap second before the epoch.
• Time.gov is in the 20K most trafficked sites because people around the world reference it’s time. This requires a well-oiled server environment as well as streamlined code.

Happy to say O&C delivered for the government… again 😉

Thanks for reading,
Morgan

Please email me at OceanAndCakeCreative@gmail.com with any comments, questions, or criticisms.