Today's good coding practice: whenever you display or report dates, use RFC3339 format in Zulu time, with the embedded T. Like this: 2025-04-17T13:31:52Z This format has several useful properties: 1. It's constant-width, at least until 100000 CE. It won't overrun or cause surprise expansion of your report columns. 2. Sort order is the same as lexicographic order - no need for complicated code to time-order records. 3. It's a single token, easy to parse out of a report (this is why you want to keep the T in the middle rather than the alternate form with a space there). 4. Usually when you're logging for human perusal, conveying sequence and relative timing of events is more important than a reference to local solar time. Using Zulu time prevents people from being confused about sequence and timing by time-zone skew. That last point is especially important for things like network-accessible databases, or distributed version-control systems, where records are routinely modified and timestamped by users in different time zones.