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Storing UTC is not a silver bullet (2019)


Note: this is a pretty long post. If you’re not interested in the details, the conclusion at the bottom is intended to be read in a standalone fashion. There’s also a related blog post …

We can also preserve the version of the time zone rules used for that computation, as a way of allowing the process of updating entries to be restarted after a failure without starting from scratch, but it’s not strictly required. In Twitter threads discussing time zone rule changes, there’s been a general assertion that it’s safe to only store the UTC instant related to an event in the past. Part of the point of writing this blog post is to raise awareness, so that even if people do still recommend storing UTC, they can add appropriate caveats rather than treating it as a universal silver bullet.

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