Who writes this, and how

Who I am

My name is Nicolai Lykke. I am an independent developer working as Black Falcon Data, and I build and run this site. I also run its Danish sister site, tidsforskel.dk, which answers the same questions for a Danish audience on the same engine. Time zones became a subject of mine the way they do for anyone who works across them: by getting them wrong, at a cost, often enough to want a tool that does not.

There is no anonymous content desk behind these pages. The 49 guides published so far all carry my name, and the contact address on the contact page reaches me directly.

How a guide gets made

Every guide starts from a question people actually ask, usually one the site's own tools raise but cannot answer in a number, like why China keeps a single time zone or what happens to the date when you fly east across the Pacific. I set the brief, research it, check each factual claim against a primary source, and edit the finished text before it goes live. Nothing is published that I have not read line by line and am not willing to sign.

The rules I hold the text to are deliberately narrow:

• Primary sources only. Offsets and transition dates come from the IANA Time Zone Database; standards questions go to the bodies that own them (the BIPM and IERS for UTC and leap seconds, national governments for their own clock changes). Where a claim rests on a source, that source is named on the sources & method page.
• No invented numbers. If I cannot source a statistic, it does not appear. A guide that says "many travellers" instead of a fabricated percentage is doing the honest thing.
• Season-stable phrasing. These pages are built once and read for months, so an offset is written in a form that stays true all year, "UTC+1 in winter and UTC+2 in summer", never as a bare "right now" that silently rots at the next clock change.
• One at a time. Guides are published on a schedule, days apart, as each one is finished. The site does not dump a batch of articles in a single day.

Corrections

Time-zone data changes (governments move clock changes, sometimes at a few weeks' notice), and I get things wrong like anyone else. If a time, a date or a claim on this site looks wrong, write to me via the contact page and say which place or which guide it concerns. Data errors are fixed at the source so every page that depends on them is corrected at once; text errors are fixed in the guide itself. I do not quietly delete a page to make a mistake go away.

How the site is funded, and what that does not buy

timezonecompare.com is free to use and is paid for by advertising. Nobody pays for coverage here: there are no sponsored guides, no paid links and no affiliate deals inside the editorial text, and no advertiser sees a guide before it is published or has any say in what it says. The tools and the writing exist to answer the question you arrived with. If they ever stop doing that in favour of an advertiser, the site has failed at the only thing it is for.

More about how the times themselves are computed is on the sources & method page, and more about the site as a whole on the about page.