UTC is Enough for Everybody, Right?
summary
UTC alone is usually fine for timestamps but it misses scheduling edge cases: Samoa shifting the International Date Line (Dec 29→31, 2011) and calendar mismatches that make arrivals fall on the wrong day. Best practice is store UTC timestamps plus a store zone identifier (Olson/TZDB name), persist local wall‑clock where fidelity matters (meeting start), emit ISO 8601 strings to clients, use HTML <time> with datetime/title, and rely on libraries (Rails ActiveSupport, moment/luxon, Chronic, ice_cube; RFC 5545 for RRULE) for recurring events.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction and time challenges
- 3:12What is time and its history
- 8:45Why time is really hard
- 13:25Storing time in systems
- 17:15Transmitting time to users
- 21:49Formatting time for users
- 24:40Inputting time in applications
- 26:47Time logic and recurring events
- 30:21Recommendations and best practices
- 32:08Conclusion and final thoughts
