SuperHappyDevHouse (SHDH) is a long-running series of informal, all-night hacker gatherings—part LAN party, part startup incubator, part social event—founded in Silicon Valley in 2005 for people to build, share, and celebrate creative technical projects.
SuperHappyDevHouse was founded by Jeff Lindsay and David Weekly on May 29, 2005, conceived as a mashup of a LAN party and open-ended development time: a relaxed space where hackers, founders, designers, and hobbyists gathered to write code, swap ideas, and collaborate on whatever they felt like building. The Bay Area events drew 150–200 people every six weeks at rotating venues around San Francisco and Silicon Valley, explicitly aiming to "resurrect the spirit of the Homebrew Computer Club," the 1970s hobbyist group that helped seed the personal-computer industry.
Rather than a competition or a product-focused hackathon, SHDH prized creativity and community for their own sake, and the format spread as other cities ran their own DevHouses. Its most durable legacy is Hacker Dojo, the Mountain View hackerspace that grew out of the SHDH community in 2009, and the events are widely credited as an influence on the broader hackathon and hackerspace movements that followed.
I first came across SuperHappyDevHouse while talking with a friend about starting a nerd night of my own.