Here are some testimonials of people who frequently attend DevHouse and have done some exciting things at the events.
Otavio Good
SHDH is about creative people. I've worked and discussed and collaborated with people on many projects at Dev House since I started going. When I started the project that became the Word Lens iPhone app, I showed people the prototype from an early stage and ended up getting a lot of help from Dev House friends (Thanks everybody). Dev House is inspiring and fun and all those other words that you use to rate a good TED video. :)
Adam Smith
DevHouse and (the development-focused LAN parties that preceded it) have been the headquarters of my secret hacker lifestyle for almost a decade now. I've lost track of the number of different programming languages, libraries and tools that I've adopted and then later used in a project as a direct result of a interactions at a DevHouse.
Beyond this, I couldn't expect the depth of experience and perspective I'd gain by being part of the community. I didn't intend to make the DriveByCTF war driving game (2003), the AjaxWar RTS-in-the-browswer (2004), the ProjectCicada clandestine DNS tunnel (2005), the Bleeper streaming soundtrack for DevHouse coded 1000 miles away (2006), the Argument mixed-meta whiteboard game (2007), the DevHouse badge system (2008), the ShortWiki sms-only wiki for the developing world (2009), or the CoupledSystems rhythm game (2010) -- they just happened naturally in the productive party atmosphere.
Kathleen Tuite
The first SHDH I went to was back in 2007... maybe SHDH #16? I brought my laptop and worked on my first ever facebook application that my boyfriend Adam Smith had helped me start. The app, "Kathleen's weird sorta-like poking thing" is, basically, the original Super Poke. I remember Jeff Lindsay asking me if I was a hacker, and me hesitating a moment but then deciding that yes, yes I was (am) a hacker.
I feel that there are two philosophies that I picked up from Adam and the people of SHDH and have since wholly adopted: (1) coding and hacking as a hobby or even a *craft* and (2) being part of the social culture surrounding that craft. I had been making webpages since I was 10, but the last time I had tried to share that with anyone was when I got some of my friends to live down the street from me on Geocities and tutored them on HTML. In school, studying computer science, I only really geeked out with people during class projects. Heck, I even found Adam at school. But then I met all these nice, creative, smart people outside of school that just go learn whatever they need to and make awesome things. Not all things made at SHDH are made out of code, there are people building robots and carding wool, but I've definitely found programming to be the right level of power and expressiveness and flexibility for me. Before, no one around me was coding for fun and it just didn't occur to me that I could learn to make a flash game or an Android app in a weekend.
Now I'm working on my PhD at UW in Seattle. I work on lots of little projects, sometimes related to my research and sometimes not, but everything I experiment with makes me better at what I do, in and out of school. I still fly down for SHDH a lot, and for some more focused events at the Hacker Dojo, like TIGJam and last year's Android Hackathon. I'm proud that I've helped at least one person here in Seattle (my undergrad research assistant) realize that *she* can make games and experiment if she wants to. And you can, too!