After two decades of planning, Rubin Observatory is finally observing the sky. Built to image the entire southern hemisphere every few nights with a 3.2-gigapixel camera, Rubin will produce a time-lapse of the Universe, revealing moving asteroids, pulsing stars, supernovae, and rare transients that you only catch if you're always watching.

In this talk, I'll share the “first look” images from Rubin Observatory as well as what it took to get here: from scalable algorithms to infrastructure that moves data from a mountaintop in Chile to scientists around the world in seconds. I'll reflect on what we learned building the data management system in Python over the years, including stories of choices that impacted scalability, interfaces, and maintainability. Rubin Observatory is here. And it's for you.