Why data scientists hate summertime

Summertime is nice and cosy, isn't it`? But not when it comes to data science. All that timezone-summer resp. daylight-saving-time issues are just a pain. But why is that? Because advanced data analytics – everything beyond doing rather simple things in enormous spreadsheets – require unique UTC timestamps.

Getting UTC timestamps from data files can be tricky, especially when it's summertime and a certain timezone but the file does not tell us. This leads to well-known situations where data science means 80% data cleaning and 20% science.

Summertime and timezone issues caused us several nightshifts while fine-tuning the data import procedure in our OpenPi in order to manage any kind of incoming data. And that's the reason why we hate summertime. But not the summer of course. Because summer is nice and cosy ;o)