What's your timezone?

As you may already know, Platform.sh is a fully distributed company.

I can even say that we were born as a distributed company. Since day one, we have had people all over the globe (USA, Canada, France, UK, Germany), and we have now expanded with people in Hong Kong, Australia, India, Greece, Italy, and Serbia.

We all work remotely or in our different offices in Paris, Cologne, London, or San Francisco. 100% of our tools and communication happen in the cloud, and are available to everyone all the time.

We also keep adding or replacing existing tools based on everyone’s needs or ideas.

Lately, as we have grown and hired new people, some of our teammates complained about not knowing when someone would be available for a chat, or when to schedule meetings and whatnot.

After some Googling, I found about Timezone.io, which seemed to solve our issue. However, it requires the team page to be public, which wasn’t acceptable for some of our teammates.

After some more Googling, I found this GitHub repository which is a Node.js clone of Timezone.io that can be self-hosted.

Great, Platform.sh supports Node.js! And at Platform.sh, we like eating our own dog food ;)

I quickly got it running on Platform.sh by simply adding the configuration files. I opened a GitHub Pull Request so you can try it yourself.

I then got an SSL certificate for our internal domain timezone.internal.platform.sh (the site is behind authentication for the reason mentioned above). I also integrated the Platform.sh project with our GitLab instance so that everyone can easily make changes and maintain the application.

It is now available for everyone at Platform.sh, and is displayed in various places, like the title of our #sales Slack channel :)

Happy timezoning..