Many thanks and much respect to Aunty Di for that wonderful welcome to your land, and I want to acknowledge all Wurundjeri elders past and present, as well as any other community elders here today.
It's important to understand our past and our present so we can better shape our future - this is just as true for developers as it is for anyone else. We look at the decisions of our peers, the legacy code we've inherited, the strengths and weaknesses of the technologies we work with. All of this helps shape our future code to be more reliable, easier to maintain, better, faster.
And here in Melbourne - also known as Narrm - we need to recognise we are on land that has been occupied by the Kulin nations for tens of thousands of years, land that was invaded. That is our collective past. Our future must be better, and that can only be the case if we ground ourselves in the reality of how we got here.
Hello everyone. My name is Pat Allan. Sorry if that was a little heavy, but I think it's important to understand where we stand, the context in which we work and live and play.
I'm part of the organising team behind this conference, and while I'm mostly going to sit back and let our magnificent masters of ceremony lead us through these two joyous and thoughtful days, I just wanted to add a little more context.
We live, clearly, in interesting times.
We're dealing with massive societal challenges, at many levels - and those of us here have likely got it easier than most. Amongst all of that, we write code - and maybe that feels small in comparison, but let me assure you that that code matters! As Merrin Macleod - who is speaking later today - reminded us at the end of the last RubyConf AU, technology is inescapably political. Humans are involved, after all. And our code impacts humans.
But it's not just code that brings us here today - it's community as well. There are regular discussions about how we interact with each other, how we do things with thoughtfulness and compassion - these discussions are important, and I'm really happy some of the topics covered today and tomorrow focus on such things.
So we have, I hope, the opportunity to write better code, and to build a better community - and in the intersection of that, write code that helps build a better society, in both large and small ways. Something to keep in mind, perhaps, over the next two days. I know many of you in this room, and so I am absolutely certain we’re up for tackling these challenges.
Oh, and one more thing…
Last year, the fairy godmother of the Ruby community, Sandi Metz, opened this conference with a great deal of wisdom, but in particular she reminded us: you are good enough. You're not perfect, you've got your struggles to deal with - we all do, trust me - but you are good enough.
Please, don't forget that. And not only are you good enough, but you are also welcome here, whether it's your first RubyConf AU, or your seventh, whether you’ve written millions of lines of code, or none at all. No matter your gender, your race, your sexuality, your age, your ability, it bears repeating: You are welcome here.
We hope you have a great conference - we're so very happy that you made it.