12-06, 13:00–13:30 (UTC), Data Track
"You should never, ever deal with time zones if you can help it" Tom Scott
Instead, you should let your software deal with time zones for you.
Polars is a Dataframe library with full support for time zones - come and learn how to leverage it to its full potential!
If you work with time series, you will inevitably come across time-zone-related issues, such as daylight saving time or time zone changes. The bad news is that these issues are incredibly difficult to deal with by hand. The good news is that Polars has full support for time zones built-in! By letting Polars handle time zones for you, your time series analysis not only be blazingly fast, but also very rock-solid.
No prior Polars knowledge is expected (though basic familiarity would be helpful).
The format of the talk will be:
- 5 minutes: motivation, why should you never ever deal with time zones by hand?
- 5 minutes: Polars crash course
- 7.5 minutes: parsing datetimes in Polars (including time-zone-aware ones)
- 7.5 minutes: time zones in other Polars operations (offsets, resampling, truncation, ...)
- Q&A
By the end of the talk, you will have learned how to effectively leverage Polars when performing time series analysis involving time zones.
No previous knowledge expected
Marco Gorelli is a Senior Software Engineer at Quansight Labs, primarily working on DataFrame APIs. He is also a volunteer maintainer of Polars and paid maintainer of pandas.