CI Timezone Mismatch Exposed a Hidden Date Comparison Bug in Scheduled Reminders
A developer discovered that a test for scheduled reminders passed locally but consistently failed in CI, with the only difference being timezone settings — the local machine used Eastern Time while the CI runner operated in UTC. At 11 PM Eastern, a reminder scheduled for that time would already fall on the next calendar day in UTC, causing the date comparison to fail. The root bug was in the feature itself: the code compared a reminder's fixed timestamp against 'today' without converting both values to a common timezone first. The fix involved converting both sides to UTC before comparing, since the reminder represented a single absolute instant rather than a user-local calendar day. The developer also reconfigured CI to intentionally run in a different timezone than local dev machines, ensuring similar timezone-related bugs surface immediately rather than by chance.
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