All timestamps in Amethyst’s database are in UTC. Out of the box, Padrino and ActiveRecord assume they are in the local timezone. There may be a better way (i.e., ORM agnostic), but this works for ActiveRecord. In config/boot.rb:
##
# Add your before load hooks here
#
Padrino.before_load do
I18n.locale = :en
ActiveRecord::Base.time_zone_aware_attributes = true
ActiveRecord::Base.default_timezone = :utc
end
The first assignment sets the default locale (found this in the Padrino Localization guide). The next two are ActiveRecord specific. I dug into the Rails lib/initializer.rb code to find them.