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This was an excellent DevHouse. The attendance was great, the people were great, the ideas were great… it was a great experience. I just can’t get over how awesome it is to be surrounded by such smart, inspiring, fun people.

This was SuperHappyDevHouse 10000. We always like to play with the event number for DevHouse events, so you probably realize that 10000 is binary for 16. We could have used hexidecimal and made it 10 to screw with your heads, but then we’d miss out on a great over 9000 reference opportunity.

Like I said, attendence was great. It was a nice coincidence that Startup School was happening earlier in the day. Entrepreneurial hackers from all over attended that event, and we got to take advantage of it thanks to Nick and Joel’s publicity work and our nifty new pocket flyers. They were quite successful as we had a good number of Startup Schoolers show up for DevHouse.

This was the first event sponsored by Mohr Davidow Ventures, our new exclusive sponsor for the next 10 events. They’re taking care of all our basic expenses and allowing us to put a little money into marketing material, new tables, etc. It shouldn’t be a surprise that MDV is the VC firm that recently funded PBwiki, David’s original DevHouse creation and success story.

Thanks to some new furniture of David’s new roommate, we put together another couch hacking room that was put to good use. Our new tables are a great improvement over our warped, cumbersome tables that we used before. The new ones afforded more flexibility in putting together a spacious, yet efficient table hacking room. There was also some excellent grilling that went on in the backyard, so thanks to everybody that brought grill goodies.

I was happy to see that there were more female hackers joining us this time. It seems like we’re slowly gaining traction in the female coder market because I’m seeing more and more women attend. Though DevHouse has always seemed to do a pretty good job at avoiding the boys-only status common with most computer events.

It turns out the whiteboard is a great way to prototype abstract games on the fly by playing as you go. I did some fun, collaborative whiteboard game prototyping with some friends. The games were nice and abstract and we constrained the design to things we could represent as a node graph. We came up with a few compelling ideas, but we didn’t move on to computer prototyping. It was the first time I’ve done that sort of free-form, low-tech prototyping in real time with other people.

Speaking of games, Jon Blow made it to DevHouse. He’s responsible for the award-winning, though unreleased, time puzzle game Braid, as well as the Experimental Gameplay Sessions at the GDC. To those of us progressive game developer types, he’s one of the more respected figures in the industry, so I really enjoyed getting to talk with him.

Also, we’d originally planned to organize lightning talks at this event to bring back a more low production version of the DevHouse presentations we used to do. Unfortunately we didn’t do very well getting that off the ground this time, but it’ll most likely happen in the coming events.

With the lightning talks we want to provide a venue for quick, ad-hoc talks that would be beneficial to our DevHouse hacker community. This includes run-throughs or demos of useful technology both new and old, how-to’s and hacks for common unaddressed problems, and possibly intros and directions to resources on relevant, complementary topics within the broad categories of business, design, science, etc.

So keep that in mind as the next SuperHappyDevHouse approaches, which is most likely going to happen the last Saturday of April. If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up on our super low traffic mailing list to get our official event announcements.

To everybody that made it to this last DevHouse, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. You can see all the photos taken with the shdh16 Flickr tag. Otherwise here’s one more:

This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 12:15 am and is filed under Social, Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.