The global agreement that dates should stop being a confusing mess of ambiguity.
means An international standard that specifies how to write dates and times in a single unambiguous format, primarily YYYY-MM-DD for dates and HH:MM:SS for times.
from Published in 1988 by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), a Swiss-based body that codifies technical standards. The 8601 designation simply means it was their 8601st standard—less poetic than you'd hope, but it solved a real problem: before this, Americans wrote 12/6/95 (December 6th) while others wrote 6/12/95 (June 12th), creating perpetual digital chaos.
unix timestamps — Seconds since 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z, the backbone of digital time
git commits — Version control systems log all changes in strict ISO 8601 format
javascript date objects — toISOString() method returns dates in this exact standard