EDT vs UTC — cities and working rhythm
US East Coast summer offset (mid-March to early November), UTC-4. The narrower gap to Europe (only 4 h during northern-hemisphere summer) means early-morning EU meetings align with reasonable East Coast times.
UTC is the reference offset — not a civil timezone anywhere, but the standard for aviation ("Zulu time"), server logs, astronomy, and cross-timezone team calendars. When distributed engineering teams schedule "the daily standup at 15:00 UTC" they're dodging the DST-flip mess entirely.
Time gap: UTC is 4.0 hours ahead of EDT (standard-time offsets — daylight-saving flips shift this by an hour twice a year in most northern-hemisphere zones).