WIRED:At first glance, it looks like some sort of confused geek class war. The quiet barricades of a mansion in Los Gatos, one of the richer suburbs of Silicon Valley, have been overrun with a sketchy-looking army of junior revolutionaries.
Every room in this beautiful and seemingly endless home (with hot-tub, swimming pool and fire pit) has a gang of shoeless nerds squatting within, either talking loudly to one another or, more often, staring intently into their open laptops. In the open-plan kitchen, a calm but overworked person with "Mom" on her name badge is co-ordinating a meal of beef and macaroni for 200 people. She seems happy with her visitors, but who knows what nerdy ransoms they have taken? This is the 19th SuperHappyDevHouse, a six-weekly festival of programming hosted in a Silicon Valley home, devoted to 12 hours of supposedly intense networking of both the social and the computer kind. Anyone can come, with the aim of attracting labour, braincells or just applause for their fledgling ideas. It's not a party to get venture capital or even employment: the main idea is to develop software in an atmosphere more friendly than the antiseptic world of the office or the lonely garret of the entrepreneur's bedroom, and to encourage interaction with other local wellsprings of coding genius.
Not that everybody here could easily be pigeonholed as the programming stereotype. Most of the people do look like the Valley's traditional posterboys: white, male and nerdy. But age and gender, while heavily distorted towards young and male, are not exclusive barriers. One coder at the last event was unnerved to find a venture capitalist younger than he was (possibly returning from the nearby Startup School, a VC-funded briefing on how to start a business). I spot the pioneer Lee Felsenstein, whose work at the 1970s equivalent of the SuperHappyDevHouse, the Homebrew Computer Club, kickstarted the microcomputer revolution, holding forth to awed listeners.
Bratty male coders attempting to talk over the women here do so at their peril - and blanch when they realise they've just snubbed world-famous programming celebrities.
Finally, when Chris Messina and Tara Hunt, two San Francisco personalities who in a more uncivilised age would have been called marketers and spurned by traditional developers, arrive, a crowd around them gathers - instead of villagers wielding pitchforks. That's a degree of inclusiveness you don't get in many geeks' homes. That said, the core here has to be techiness. I speak to one of the more mature attendees, who describes himself as "primarily a musician". That's true, although the description neglects to mention that he is also in the middle of writing a program that will allow composers like himself to create and manipulate their own music live in front of an audience.
To do so, he's re-engineered an entire operating system. But before we can discuss the idea in more detail, he is hijacked by another musician attending the party.
I move on to an old friend who now works at Google but is mostly keen to talk about the computer language he has invented ("It's Lisp if Unix and Python had won," he says cryptically). He is in turn distracted by a bunch of nearby hardware hackers, who are fiddling with what appears to be a computer motherboard made of Lego.
They don't have much time to finish up: at 11pm, the lightning talks begin, where anyone has five minutes to tell the rest of the SuperHappyDevelopers what they're up to. But they're already being distracted by someone else. Attention deficit disorder, the black lung of Silicon Valley's code-miners, strikes again.
Does much work get done in this environment? Very few complete applications are small enough to get written over the course of 12 hours, and a room crammed full of loud, eagerly socialising nerds is not perhaps the best conditions for deep coding concentration.
Dave Weekly, one of the event's founders, took his evening project, PBWiki ("It's as easy as a peanut-butter sandwich") and built a business from it with millions of users. Weekly, though, is the exception rather than the rule.
Apparently, matters do not get better once the alcohol begins to bite in the evening. Outside its own attendees, the torrid gossip of goings-on in bathrooms in previous SuperHappyDevHouses are more common than tales of finished applications.
I leave at 9pm, my humble project having barely progressed. But I had fun while I was doing it, and felt a little less useless than usual in the company of such fast thinkers. My neighbour on the couch asked me if I could see something wrong with her code: I'm no programmer, but I could see a simple typo that she had missed. And a chief technical officer with an idea for reforming political activism successfully commandeered me to uncover a website that could provide her with the electoral data she needed.
Increasingly, modern web applications are not made in isolation from each other; they are built by creating glue code between existing services.
A working prototype can be made by stitching together other completed work in a new way. It makes sense that coders should reach out to work in the same way: plundering the existing ideas of others and generously offering theirs for the taking.
