Arjun Mehta

Arjun got into timezone work almost by accident. Early in his career, he was building a flight booking engine and discovered that a one-hour DST error was silently miscalculating layover times for connections through São Paulo — passengers were being told they had a three-hour layover when they actually had two. That single bug took three weeks to fully trace, and it changed the direction of his career. He realized that timezone handling is one of those problems that looks trivial on the surface but is genuinely, structurally hard.

Over the next twelve years, he built timezone-aware systems for airline scheduling, cross-border logistics (where a shipment's "arrival date" can depend on which side of a timezone boundary the warehouse sits on), workforce management platforms, and global event scheduling tools. Along the way, he became intimately familiar with the IANA Time Zone Database — the open-source dataset that every phone, server, and laptop on Earth uses to determine local time. He has contributed patches to the database, primarily around South Asian and Southeast Asian timezone rule changes.

Arjun holds an M.Tech in Computer Science, where his thesis focused on geospatial indexing for temporal data — essentially, how to query "what time was it at this GPS coordinate on this date?" efficiently across billions of records. That work still informs how he thinks about timezone problems: as spatial problems, not just temporal ones. A timezone boundary is, at its core, a line on a map — and those lines are political, messy, and change more often than people realize.

He is particularly vocal about one pet peeve: developers who hardcode UTC offsets instead of using IANA timezone identifiers. "UTC+5:30 tells you nothing about DST rules, historical changes, or future policy shifts," he's fond of saying. "America/New_York tells you everything." His writing reflects this practical, opinionated perspective — he cares less about theory and more about what actually breaks in production.