Written for Fast Thinking, 2007. Not published… Version 2 was published instead.

Mike Lewis is 21. He’s rake thin, with dark hair, an eyebrow piercing and a winning smile. We’re in a large beautiful home in Los Altos, near San Jose, California. There are more than a hundred people here, drinking and partying. Mike bounces over to our photographer. “Do you work with film?” he asks. “I want to show you something!” He’s pulls out his own camera, a Canon Powershot A710. He’s hacked it so it works as a light meter.

This is definitely not your ordinary party. This is SuperHappyDevHouse. Every second person has a laptop in front of them. One room is filled with couches and people sprawl on the floor in between. Another has rows of tables with power strips and coders typing intently.

It’s Mike’s first time here. He works in a new trendy programming language called Ruby-on-Rails, so his name tag has a red spot on it. He’s here to meet other creative people and that’ll help him find like-minded programmers at the party. Different spots indicate other programming languages. Green is PHP, Blue is Python, Black is Perl.

The parties evolved out of the ashes of another scene that got too big. “David Weekly used to have huge parties called SuperHappyFunHouse in this small mansion,” says Jeff Lindsay, 21, one of the co-founders of SHDH. “The last one the FBI was on high alert.”

“It was a SWOT team,” chimes in Tom Harrison.

“He lived there with like five people,” Lindsay continues. “They had full on DJs, bar tenders.”

Instead, Weekly started to host slightly lower-key movie nights. “And I said, what if we bring our laptops and work on stuff?” says Lindsay. “Finally I got him to try it and we got like 20 people. That old crowd was people in high places, and it kind of bootstrapped into the success of this.”

“I started wondering if this could scale. Could we do this with a lot of people? But I didn’t have a venue.” Jeff knew Tom had all that infrastructure from the LAN party days.

The house belongs to Tom’s Dad, Joel, founder of Quantum Corporation and a self-confessed “start-up junkie”, but as his name badge attests, he’s just ‘The Dad’. “Throughout high school, Tom was involved with hosting LAN parties. He could accommodate 100 people. It evolved into this,” says Harrison Senior.

That was 2005. Now the parties attract more than 150 programmers and friends over their 11-hour duration and switch monthly between two houses.

The founders are keenly aware of Silicon Valley’s DIY heritage. Tom was the same age as some of Steve Wozniak’s kids at Los Gatos High School. Woz used to work the audio for some of the school plays. It’s a small community.

“One of the earliest things about Silicon Valley was the early hackers came from a communalistic hippy mentality. You know, the early 60s and 70s, the Homebrew Computer Club,” says Jeff. “People would be very cooperative. That’s what bootstrapped Silicon Valley into being a tech bleeding edge area. I think DevHouse contributes to that and keeps Silicon Valley healthy.”
The walls of the house are covered in Barbara Harrison’s gorgeous quilts and adorned with large white boards emblazoned “use me!” Of course, someone has changed one to “abuse me”.

Out on the porch there’s more chatter but just as many laptops. Robert, 26, sits with his bright green hair trying to work out some bugs in a Java program he’s developing. On the table between him and Amit (“Why should I tell you my age?) is primary-coloured Lego blocks bound up with green logic boards and chips, a USB cord snaking back to Amit’s PC.

So, Amit, what are you working on? “I don’t know. I just bought all these parts and now I’m trying to learn from them,” he says. “The site is makingthings.com — they have a controller kit and then a bunch of random accessories. The computer is reading the sensors. It sends information back to the motors. That’s about it. It doesn’t do much yet. I don’t have any hopes for it yet.”

It’s 6.15pm. We still have six hours to go. In the family room, Kirrily Robert, 32, Liz Henry, 38, and Danny O’Brien, 38 are currently installing Lambda Moo, an old-style virtual world. “I’m gratifying a whim,” says Robert. “It’s retro Second Life”.
“If you can work out how to run it in a Cheroot jail, that’d be hot,” says Danny.

What?

“The ReadMe recommends that,” he says. Liz has purple hair, an eyebrow piercing and bare feet, along with half the rest of the patrons. Danny has a sweet English accent and a T-Shirt declaring his support for privacy and free speech.

Funnily enough, in the other room is Erik Ostrom, who ran the original Lambda Moo for a number of years. He is somewhat bemused about Kirrily’s enthusiasm for the old space and doesn’t tell her who he is. He’s quiet and unobstrusive, just another programmer with a laptop. “There’s something strange about being famous amongst a very limited number of people,” he says.

Not every body is playing with software. Downstairs by the pool is Nick Papadakis, 44, who’s playing with models of DNA and has virus models that have been printed out using a 3D colour printer. He enthusiastically explains all about helices and crossover bindings to anyone who stops by. “It’s a research project I was doing at CalTech a couple of years ago, to use DNA as a structural material to make very tiny objects. Then my friend Paul Rothemund had a breakthrough and made it much easier to think about making arbitrary patterns. He realised he could use multiple crossovers to hold a single piece of DNA into any shape.” Paul’s the one who made the cover of Nature with a smiley face made out of DNA. Nick is looking for collaborators and funding. But what has this got to do with SHDH?

“I have no idea. This is an anti-computer thing,” he says, holding up the model of DNA molecules. “This is mostly just to talk to people. It doesn’t hurt that one of my friends invented 3D printing.”

At 8.33pm, Zack G, 19, exclaims “Omigod!” He turns to the people next to him. “The Facebook sourcecode has been leaked!” He types it immediately through to the irc channel being broadcast on the wall.  “Facebook sourcecode leaked. Facebooksecrets.blogspot.com.”

At 9.45pm, on the front lawn, we’re treated to five-minute lighting talks by a bevvy of hacker brains. One is from SuperHappyDevHouse New Zealand, where SilverStripe is creating software used by the New Zealand government.

The most exciting of these talks is from Meredith L Patterson, 30, CTO of Osogato. She and her husband Len Sassaman, 27 — with a little help from some friends — won the challenge to hack their visitor badge from the recent hacker conference, Defcon. The badge had originally had scrolling red text down the face of it that also spelled DEFCON if you waved it in the air. The DEFCON program contained a lengthy poem by the badge’s creator about its inner workings.

“The idea of just repurposing stuff is just fun for me,” says Patterson. “I like doing things that people just wouldn’t come up with.” She and Sassaman turned the badge into a line meter, soldered an iPod shuffle to it and then their friend “Tongan” found them a rapper via a World of Warcraft buddy. The rapper just happened to be in the studio somewhere in Michigan and recorded the poem against music. Their hack won and the track was played — through the iPod — at the DEFCON awards ceremony.

“It had 16kb of flash and 512 bytes of RAM and I realised we couldn’t do a Fourier transform in that space. Initially we thought we’d need to find an analog to digital transformer chip but there was one on board. It ended up being really simple: there was only one input we needed to find and constantly update.”

It’s her fifth SuperHappyDevHouse. Even though she’s a star this time with a cluster of impressed kids around, she’s modest. She’s here for collaboration and synergy. “There’s always somebody with some project I’ve never heard of before and it expands my knowledge for what can be done. Before Defcon, I’d never hacked a micro-controller before.”

The atmosphere is invigorating, inspiring, intense but unrealistic. This is essentially play. Asheesh Laroia is 21 and works for Creative Commons. He’s sitting with “TV”, 30 and they’re laughing every five minutes. They are, in many ways, the heart of SHDH. For both of them, it’s the first time here. They met each other for the first time about four hours ago. Now they’re working together on “three projects, maybe four”.

“It’s more about trading what we’ve already done,” says TV. “Like the anti-spam thing.”

Asheesh says, “It’s handy because he can tell me it’s impossible.” They fall back into talking with each other.

TV: It’s always fun to be asked to write something but it’s sad to say “you’re doomed”.

A: It’s something I’ve been thinking about for ages. And now you’ve told me why it won’t work. Using all the same arguments I would have given myself if only I had the knowledge, which is a bitch.

“The interesting things about gatherings like this is the backgrounds are different but the interests are the same. You have combined intellectual strength that doesn’t exist otherwise,” says TV. “The reason I came here is because there’s a bunch of people I knew online and wanted to meet them in real life but I also met others.” He turns to Asheesh again. “I saw on the wiki that you were from CC so that’s why I hunted you down.”

If this playful exchange results in real-world benefits, then fine, but that’s not the outcome for most. In the 28 months it’s been running, there’s only one project that’s on its way to reality, assuming that’s defined as funding and measurable outcomes.

David Weekly, who was there at the beginning had a start up company but brought a side project to the first event. “He bought a domain that night, finished it that night, and a few days later had 1000 users,” says Linsday. “Supposedly it’s now the biggest PBWiki collaborative site on the net. He recently raised a lot of money from a VC firm that now funds this party.”

It’s hard not to be aware that the house is enormous, built from one man’s good fortune, in a world where “any boy can be President” but in reality, only one out of 380 million people can actually hold that title. Towards 1am in the hot tub, one young man talks about dropping out of his computing degree, moving here to California to chase the dream, and how different his life was growing up. The lights of the upper storey shine into the darkness.

Eric Tiedemann, a 41 year old with grey-streaked hair sums it up. He speaks quietly but intensely about what it means to design. He quotes Nassim Nicholas Taleb — discovery doesn’t come through design, it comes through tinkering.

“Go forth and tinker, SuperHappyDevHouse,” he says, quietly.