SuperHappyDevHouse Comes Back For It's Record Breaking 30th Meeting
Last Saturday from 2pm-11pm, SuperHappyDevHouse (SHDH) came back to the
Sun Executive Briefing Center in Menlo Park for their milestone 30th
meeting and had an astounding 350 attendees, more than double any
previous SHDH meeting. The first DevHouse was held in late May 2005 and
consisted of about two dozen people at co-founder David Weekly's house.
It started when other co-founder Jeff Lindsay conceived of mixing a LAN
Party (where people bring computers to play video games against each
other in the same room) with productive development time. Now, every six
weeks or so, an average of 150 programmers and designers with laptops
meet up and in anarchic format work on whatever they feel like working on.
SuperHappyDevHouse is an informal get-together of geeks from all around
the Bay Area. The name comes from the "Saturday Night Live" skit "Happy
Fun Ball." Do not taunt the Happy Fun Ball! They are open to the public
and volunteer-staffed. Sun is one of the sponsors for this
tech-innovative group. In fact, Sun just helped the group to acquire a
trailer to haul all of the table, chairs, and equipment necessary for
these hack parties. But this isn't the first regular nerdathon in the
Bay Area. The Homebrew Computer Club ran from 1975 to 1977 and provided
the roots for the creation of both Apple Computer and Microsoft. They
encourage "hackers and thinkers" and discourage recruiters and
marketers. (And by "hackers" they don't mean stealing military documents
or destroying the Internet. They mean creating new things.)
Some programmers come to learn a new computer language or platform
they'll use to work on their personal websites. Others give lightning
talks, or five-minute, multimedia presentations that discuss current
projects and recent innovations. Some computer hackers and
non-technologists just come to socialize. All came to Sun to have a good
time.
