DevHouseBerlin #1

The first DevHouseBerlin was a success.

On the weekend of December 6th/7th, a host of nerds gathered at our coworking space Box 119 for a weekend of hacking.

When we opened doors at 10am (not going to do that again :), we already had a handfull of people hanging out in the cockpit (Note to selfsponsors: Need more bean bags).

By noon we went full house, introduced everyone to everyone and figured out who is an expert on what topic and willing to give a presentation. After that, everybody went heads down for some collaborative hacking. The informal motto was “Never Code Alone”. We thought it would be nice if we could all learn from each other and it worked quote well.

The afternoon was dedicated to presentations ranging from Test Driven Development, Meta Programming in PHP to Fixing the Money Problem (yes, non-tech talks were also allowed and well received).

General hacking intermangled with occasional breaks for food (Thank you Spreeschnittchen!) went until 3:30. The late hours were fuelled by a steady stream of Club Mate drinks.

Sunday started a little slower but ended with a big announcement. The Soundcloud devs Eric and Henrik showed us what they starting to hack together over the course of the week and finished at DevHouseBerlin: TheCloudPlayer is a jQuery UI-based sort-of-clone of iTunes that lets you conveniently manage the music from Soundcloud in playlists and share these with friends. The UI looks stunning, works much like a native client (with keyboard shortcuts and drag and drop). The best thing is: It is open source.

Eric visited DevHouseBerlin on Saturday and immediately felt home (paraphrased):

I thought this is going to be a BarCamp-style event with lots of people chatting and talking. But when I got here, everybody was quietly hacking away, so I sat down and did the same and was happy to get some good stuff going. At the end of the day, I was sure to come back on Sunday.

Check out Thilo’s wrap-up for a second opinion.

In conclusion, DevHouseBerlin was great fun and well received. We are now thinking of doing it again on a quarterly basis. Let us know what you think. Follow DevHouseBerlin on Twitter for announcements and tag your stuff with #dhb and add your pictures to the flickr group.

Thanks to Upstream, finnlabs, Spreechnittchen and Rocket Rentals for their patience, love and support!