felt annoyed at Julia for not having exactly the same syntax for datenum/datevec/datestr as MATLAB? Me too.
If you have a date in a traditional format of "yyyy-mm-dd HH:MM:SS" julia_datenum will do the annoyance of converting the UTF8 characters into INT64 that can go in the DateTime format. It will also do the 1 day correction on the rata time, and the stupid math of getting the hours, minutes, and seconds all lined up.
it's not much, but it helps