Geeky nights at the hackers' hostel

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday July 13, 2012


Remember all those stories of Apple's Steve Wozniak sleeping under his workbench, Bill Gates forming Microsoft in his college games room, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg hacking code in his Harvard monk's cell? The truly dedicated geeks don't give a toss about luxury or comfort - they live for their work.

Out of this has come an idea, started in San Francisco, that has spread through Silicon Valley and is winging its way round the world as surely as the H3N2 virus. It's called the Hacker Hostel.
Now in most respects it's not much different from the backpacker hotels that crowd St Kilda and the inner city. Young people with huge packs, from all over the world, surging in for cheap rents, happy to share stacked bunks and communal tables.


A laptop on every surface

 But the ones in Frisco don't feature late-night parties or booze-filled fridges. Here the currency is ideas, internet connections, wi-fi, and night-long discussions about microcircuits and algorithms.

The guests are interviewed and approved for their degree of nerdiness, and there's quite a queue to choose from. The stay can be for a few days, or a few months.

This is where you go to incubate and hatch that world-changing idea. The hackers and their laptops are found on every surface - the tables, the beds, the couches, the floors.

If you run into a scientific or micro-engineering problem, chances are that there will be a PhD student at the dining table who is familiar with your question, and half a dozen bright young minds willing to talk it through.

This is the attraction, the collegiate atmosphere and ambitions. Several start-ups were launched thanks to their developers being able to live together cheaply over the few intense weeks or months when every penny was needed for the project - and the hours ran on unheeded. The starting price is an affordable $40 bed and breakfast.

In this rarified atmosphere, apps are developed, discussed, refined among the guests with the bugs and glitches identified and dealt with. Marketing ideas are worked into on-line solutions. Start-ups are floated and started up.

They swap investment advice, and practice their pitches with each other, for the day when they have to present to a venture capitalist or big-league IT firm.

The idea for this now three-premises chain of mini hostels, came from two girls who realised they liked to be amongst nerds. Jade Wang is a 28-year-old neuroscientist who started it with her friend Jocelyn Berl, and called it Chez JJ.

"It's not that nerds are necessarily socially awkward among normal people," mused Jade. "If you have a large room of 99 per cent nerds and you have that one normal person, they'd be the ones who are socially awkward."

Each hostel has a hostess who makes sure the hackers get breakfast and don't forget to eat, and points them to the dishwasher and washing machine when necessary. They might organise weekly feasts, or parties, a little social action to occasionally relax the overheated brains.

Here in Melbourne the backpacker hostels are also aware of the trend. Most of them offer free wi-fi, low-cost broadband, all the technical connections that the modern young techie demands. In St Kilda they are furious they have not received a place in the queue for the National Broadband Network, and many have signed in to the on-line NBN Petition.


That scruffy backpacker might one day be the richest man in the world.
Bill Gate circa 1970.



One thing is for sure, there is much to be gained from currying the favour of the nerds - add up the fortunes of Gates, Wozniak, Zuckerberg and other computer billionaires. That's a tourist trade worth developing.

rmailto:ray@ebeatty.com