[Spivak]

It's always nice to see someone who actually understands time.

"Convert to UTC and then throw away the time zone" only works when you need to record a specific moment in time so it's crazy how often it's recommended as the universal solution. It really isn't that hard to store (datetime, zone) and now you're not throwing away information if you ever need to do date math.

[globular-toast]

Yeah, I've been trying to convince people forever to store time zones with timestamps when appropriate. If you record events from around the world and don't record what time zone they happened in you can't even answer basic questions like "what proportion happened before lunch time?"

People love simple rules and they will absolutely take things too far. Most developers learn "just use UTC!" and think that's the last thing they ever need to learn about time.