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This is all about parsing time easily or specifying a time printing format easily:Mon Jan 2 15:04:05 -0700 MST 2006 If you rearrange it a bit:Mon Jan 2 15:04:05 2006 -0700 MST You can tell it looks like 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 if you take 15 as 3pm. This is just an easy way to remember how Go wants the format string to be specified when you parse a time (create a time object from a string).Let’s use their example in those docs:const shortForm = "2006-Jan-02" t, _ = time.Parse(shortForm, "2013-Feb-03") fmt.Println(t) The first argument to time.Parse is a format string made up of parts from that original “long form” format string at the beginning of this post. By using this format, you can create your own custom formatting. That is how line 2 is able to parse an actual time object from just the string “2013-Feb-03”. The print out on line 3 will reflect a time of midnight UTC because you did not specify any hours, minutes, seconds, or timezone. BUT, the year, month, and day will all be correct. It’s a really cool thing.Here’s the same thing but we took out the day.const shorterForm = "2006-Jan" t, _ := time.Parse(shorterForm, "2013-Feb") fmt.Println(t) What time you think it’ll give? It will give the year and month but the day will default to 1, so the 1st of Feb 2013 since we did not specify a day…But we can get even crazier:const spookyForm = "2006 ooga booga January 02" t, _ := time.Parse(spookyForm, "2020 ooga booga October 31") fmt.Println(t) This is totally valid because our format string and the string we provided to parse are of the same format. This time we are using the full month name in both as well. The time produced is October 31, 2020. Happy Halloween :)By the way, this also works in reverse when you want to turn a time object back into a string using Format method of any time struct:const spookyForm = "2006 ooga booga January 02" t, _ := time.Parse(spookyForm, "2020 ooga booga October 31") fmt.Println(t.Format(spookyForm)) Here, we still get our time “t” on line 2 but we are not default printing it. Instead, we are printing it after first formatting it with our exact same spookyForm format string as before.So, we can use the same format string to create a time and also to print out a time in that same format if we want. Line 3 above prints out our input from line 2 “2020 ooga booga October 31”.I really enjoy working with time in Go. It’s not perfect but it’s really simple and actually enjoyable :)