Content warning: suicide
This year, we ran another Ruby Retreat with 50 people in attendance. This event shows off how good the Ruby community in Australia is by gathering people together from the Friday afternoon until the Monday morning. I’d say that this event was a success again.
At the start of the event, I got up and had this to say:
DHH wrote a long blog post about how, essentially, there aren’t enough white people in London anymore and how white folk have to rise up. I won’t mince words here: He went full mask-off racist. Those views are abhorrent and have no place in a modern society. They lead down a dangerous path. We cannot be tolerant of the intolerant. The philosopher Karl Popper called this the paradox of tolerance — that a tolerant society cannot survive if it tolerates intolerance. If we allow bigotry and exclusion to stand unchallenged, they will eventually silence the very openness that makes our community strong.
I encourage you to find your voices and stand up against this intolerance whenever you see it in our community. Intolerance and division have no place in our community.
I wanted to run this Ruby Retreat because these events have exemplified the kind of community and community event I want to see more of in the developer space. These events, and those attending, have been an exact antithesis to what DHH is preaching. We are stronger together, than we would ever be split apart into different tribes.
I want these events to exist so that we can show off the great parts of the Ruby community. These events are what makes me love Ruby so much.
As our Code of Conduct says:
Whenever we come together as a community, our shared spaces are opportunities to showcase the best of what we can be. We are there to support our peers - to build each other up, to accept each other for who they are, and to encourage each other to become the people they want to be.
So as we gather here this weekend, let’s remember that the Ruby community is only as good as we make it — together. Inclusivity isn’t a one-and-done checkbox; it’s a practice. It’s in how we welcome new voices, how we disagree respectfully, and how we draw clear lines around what we will not accept. Societies have been doing this for centuries — it’s why we have laws.
Events like this show us the best version of what Ruby can be: creative, kind to all, and committed to lifting everyone up. Let’s take that attitude into this weekend, and beyond.
We saw strong evidence of this during the camp with communal lunch and dinner times, and people splitting into different groups to work on different projects, or play games like Codewords or Go. And yes, this time there was even more Blood on the Clocktower too.
One of the people present at the Retreat was a woman called Caroline Bambrick.
I knew Caroline, or Caz, through working with her during the Junior Engineering Program #2 at Culture Amp. She wowed the interviewers with her skills and got to be chosen as one of the nine people we ended up picking. While she had that common anxiety of a new starter (“omg they’re going to fire me the moment I mess up”), she ended up being a critical part of that group.
Of course, lives take different directions. I was made redundant and then Covid hit, and so we all drifted apart. I’m also remarkably bad at keeping in touch with people I would call friends.
Caroline attended both last year’s Ruby Retreat and this year’s. My only photo of her from this year’s event is of her being her extremely-picky-but-charming self, trying to best optimise the best way to stack her lunch plate to get a bit of everything and not to miss out on anything. I reckon she took about two minutes at the front of the line.
She played Codewords and laughed along with people when the game went sideways as clues were misinterpreted.
She was there for Blood on the Clocktower, where she played the role of the Scarlet Woman so utterly flawlessly it fooled us all.
She was, as best anyone could tell, another face in a crowd of 50 people.
By the following Wednesday, two days after the event, she had chosen to end her life.
The news was shared on the Ruby AU Slack this Monday morning, with over 100 broken heart reactions on that thread. The thread is full-up of stories of how Caz has impacted people’s lives for the better, and photos of her time in the Ruby community.
Her funeral was today, and a group of Australian Rubyists organised to turn up together. Quotes of her from the Ruby AU community were shared by community members Lauren, Pat and Brendan. Hugs and condolences were shared all around. I cried.
I got to talk to Caz’s mum about how she made me a better manager and a better person.
All of this is the kind of support I meant in my Ruby Retreat message. I just wish we could’ve all given this support sooner and somehow prevented this tragedy.
My head kept trying to problem-solve its way out of this horrible situation last night as a way of coping with this trauma, periodically waking me up to signal that it hadn’t yet solved the problem, but by golly it was gonna work its hardest on it. The problem isn’t solvable; the conclusion is, sadly, final.
Tonight, we had the Melbourne Ruby meetup as well. There were talks on database sharding and PostgreSQL tablespaces. Many of the attendees of the funeral were there too, but there were also some new faces who had only been attending the meetup this year. The Ruby community is still thriving in Melbourne.
After the meetup, we went out for ice cream at Pidapipo, just a short walk over into Degraves Street. There were more hugs. We took a group photo, that had a lot of the people from the meetup in it. But there will forever be a hole in our community. We have lost a strong advocate for not only the Ruby community, but humanity in general.
As was stated on that Ruby AU thread: Suicide is a very hard topic for a lot of people, please don’t suffer in silence. If you, or someone you know needs support or help, please contact:
- Lifeline provides 24-hour crisis counselling, support groups and suicide prevention services. Call 13 11 14, text 0477 13 11 14 or chat online.
- Suicide Call Back Service provides 24/7 support if you or someone you know is feeling suicidal. Call 1300 659 467.
- Beyond Blue aims to increase awareness of depression and anxiety and reduce stigma. If you or a loved one need help, you can call 1300 22 4636, 24 hours/7 days a week or chat online.
- Big Feels Club provides shared stories and experiences for people who have done ‘all the right things’ but still feel stuck.