During my two recent trips to California, I had the pleasure of spending time at Mountain View's immense hackerspace. Hacker Dojo, as described on their site, is "a community of members who share a common love of creating wonderful things and understanding how the world works":
http://hackerdojo.pbworks.com/About-Hacker-Dojo
"Hacker Dojo is a community center in Mountain View which is about 1/3rd coworking space, 1/3rd events venue, and 1/3rd a big social living room. In the spirit of DevHouse, we're creating a physical community space for hackers and thinkers on the Peninsula in the San Francisco Bay Area. This is a location for events, lectures, parties, BarCamps, DevHouses, LAN parties, hackathons, knitting circles, tinkering, brainstorming, coworking, etc."
I captured many shots of their amazing space:
http://picasaweb.google.com/pdp7pdp7/HackerDojo
During my second trip I had the good fortune to catch a talk by Lee Felsenstein who designed the first portable computer, the Osborne-1:
My time at the Hacker Dojo concluded with the exhilirating SupperHappyDevHouse (#38):
http://superhappydevhouse.org/
SHDH is a hackathon, or programming marathon, complete with lightning talks, interesting folks, food, games & fun! A group of 20 developers visiting all the way from Mexico City on a Hackspedition were among the crowd. During the day, a team of hackers reversed engineered the interface to donated LED ticker boards from the airport in order to display tweets during their lightning talk. Others worked on the open source web apps created by Dojo members in order to run all aspects of the organization from signup to scheduling, payment, and even voting:
I whole-heartedly encourage anyone passing through Silicon Valley or South Bay to pay a visit to the Hacker Dojo!
Cheers,
Drew