Alex Chaffee's blog
Now that I'm starting to use DelayedJob to perform jobs in the future in my Heroku Sinatra app, its important that they happen at the scheduled time. But unless you pay attention, you'll find that times get mysteriously changed -- in my case, since I'm in San Francisco in the wintertime, by +/-8 hours -- which means that some conversion to or from UTC is being attempted, but it's only working halfway.
Trying to keep a handle on which libraries are attempting, and which are failing, to convert times is a losing battle, so I'm trying to do the right thing and save all my times in the database in UTC, and convert them to and from the user's local time as close to the UI as possible. Unfortunately, a variety of gotchas in Ruby and ActiveRecord and PostgreSQL makes this trickier than it should be. Here's a little catalog of my workarounds.