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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

> Just use UTC folks unless you have a really good idea why you shouldn't.

If my whole team is based in Pacific Time, I'm gonna use something close to PT so I don't have to do hard math when reading raw logs.

If we're all US based, I still want something in the USA. The math is easier.

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Technical debt. Please don’t.

Yeah. I log in json + unix timestamp nanoseconds, and just convert it to something human-readable on display (github.com/jrockway/json-logs). I am not sure why logs need to be "pretty" at time of logging when they can be made pretty at time of display. Doing it at time of display means you can just use local time, and then nobody is confused.

Hard math. Ah right, I think it's not till the third year of a mathematics degree that you deal with "subtracting 8"! :)

I'm able to subtract 8, but if I'm scanning logs it's one more thing to process.

If it's local time I know instantly when something happened, without having to do mental math.

Is there anything wrong with ISO8601 (including timezone offset) for storing times? They're in my local time, but they can be accurately converted to any other timezone.

No problem as long as it's all local, but it's a big annoyance to the other teams if I'm trying to coordinate with the West US team who're on PT, the East coast on ET, Europe on CET, India on IST, Australia on BBQ...

It's just easier for everyone if we agree on UTC and everyone knows their own offset.

Don't forget changing the day 1/3 of the time. But more importantly, if I'm scrambling to solve an incident, the last thing I want to do is deal with time conversions in my head.

You just do it once and think in UTC going forward. But as I said to the other person, if you're only dealing with one timezone it's fine, just when you have multiple it's a lot easier to just deal with one time and let everyone convert.

I'd expect everyone who works in computer related jobs to know their UTC offset.

Why not just store everything utc but add a local time to the logging along with it?

Nowadays you could probably pull that off, most tools support quickly changing the time on the fly.

`date -u` gives you current UTC time when the arithmetic trips you up.

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