This has got to be the ultimate name-dropping post. I’m tempted just to make a list. Or perhaps it should be like Jeopardy, I’ll list the products or companies and you guess who was there. I am of course talking about the Hackaday Bay Area Maker Faire Meetup last Saturday which started off as a steady stream of Faire-weary exhibitors and suddenly the place was packed to the gills. Luckily we have some photographic evidence of the awesome.
If you do something three times you can start saying “always”, right? We always host a meetup on the Saturday night of Bay Area Maker Faire at O’Neill’s Irish Pub in San Mateo. It’s our kind of atmosphere: just enough room to set up hacks you tote along with you, they have Guinness, Lagunitas, and a few in-betweens on tap, you can bring in food from the various eateries that border the bar, and the staff is beyond awesome.
Despite my threat to call-out everyone by name, I’ll keep it to a minimum. It was most excellent meeting Peter Jansen who created the Open Source Science Tricorder, fourth place winner of the Hackaday Prize in 2014. I was glad to see Windell Oskay of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories there since both Windell and Peter are Ph.D. Physicists. Of course it ended up they are able to converse with regular people too.
In the back Erick Schlaepfer was showing off his MOnSter6502 — check out the interview I did with him about it the day before. Astute readers will recognize who he’s showing that to: Hackaday Editor Emeritus Caleb Kraft stopped by on his way to the MAKE staff party. Somehow, although we shared a beer, neither of us thought of taking a picture together — perpetuating the mythos that Caleb is the Tyler Durden to my Tyler Durden. Incidentally, if anyone knows Chuck Palahniuk (or if he reads Hackaday which would be killer) we’d love to have him speak at SuperCon. Email me.
Also on the ‘didn’t get pictures of’ list is Anouk Wipprecht who stopped by later in the evening. I love her work and it was really great to meet her. Oops, and I’m not supposed to be dropping names. Paul Stoffregen (talking to Gerrit Coetzee and me in the bottom left corner of the image at the top of this post). Okay, enough of that.
There seemed to be a critical mass of Amp Hour elites on the scene. I grabbed this image from Chris Gammell’s Twitter. He snapped a still of Tony Long, Alan Yates, and Jeff Keyzer who have all been on the show (or hosted it). Karl Bowers, host of The Spark Gap podcast, photobombs on the left.
This barely brushes the tip of the iceberg. But I figure you get tired of hearing me prattle on. If you attended I’d love to see the photos you snapped, please link them in the comments below. And of course, if you do still want to play name-that-geek-celeb the comments are the place for it.
Thanks to Rich Hogben for taking all of these great photos and posting them up on Hackaday.io. I’d also like to thank Supplyframe for picking up everyone’s first round of drinks that night. Maker Faire has ended, but this evening will always have a special place in my heart. We look forward to seeing everyone there next year!
I just went home and slept :(
My body wishes I had done that. But my soul worked something out with it and they’re on good terms again.
It was a real blast, put it in your calendar for next year!
Enjoyable meetup with some good conversations. It was pointed out to me that there were some ‘celebrities’ there which I found amusing as I am not sure what makes a hacker a celebrity :-)
Based on the blurb above, it seems you have to have a podcast or vlog ;)
It was a great party, thanks for the beer! I think this is a find Saturday night tradition.
It was an awesome meetup! Thanks to hackaday for organizing the fun.
This would’ve been great. Only saw you for a moment at the hotel; let’s catch up soon.
Question… Is Brian more tolerable when he is drinking?
Man, hackaday commentors need an editor. I wasn’t even there.
What kinds of local brew?
Too bad Caleb lost his hair.
I didn’t loose it! It is in a baggy in a drawer somewhere in my house.
I love great times like this. I’ve been a game dev since the 8bit days and in the 90’s when trade shows were closed doors we have have pub meet ups like this with everyone who was everyone having a laugh, chatting about coding and generally getting drunk. :) Life is slower now for me but happy memories. Saver these times when you can. :)
Can you even enter the pub if you haven’t hit the magic number (21) yet? It’d be fun to show up even though I can’t drink.
Tsutomu from the left