LAN Party House We built our house for LAN parties This is our basement game room. 12 PCs are built into the walls. Game Stations These fold up nicely when not in use. Closed station Open station Dance Dance Revolution There are DDR pads in the floor. The Upstairs Office We can game here too. Board games are games, right? Computer Mode The table also transforms to reveal six more game stations. Two sit-stand desks in the back are our personal workstations. (But that's not me in the seat. That's Lester.) Cable Management Video and USB cables pass into conduits... Which eventually lead to... The Engine Room 20 identical game machines. All game machines netboot from a shared disk image on this server. Our personal desktops Dedicated A/C intakes from behind the machines and supplies cold air here. Door leads to the "hot side". The "Hot Side" It's actually not that hot. Networking Lots of cat6: 35 wall boxes with 4 ports each 7 PoE WAPs 8 PoE security cameras 3 PoE intercoms All network equipment and cameras are UniFi. Egads! This photo has made a lot of network engineers angry! Response in the Q&A. 2 Gbps fiber internet Components This is the hardware before it went into the machines. (Note: This was in 2023.) Intel Core i5-13600 32GB RAM GeForce RTX 4070 An insanely unstable motherboard with 10G ethernet on-board. Don't buy this. :( Assembly My (Kenton's) friends from junior high helped assemble the machines and pull the cables. We've been doing LAN parties together for nearly 30 years. Lester Jesse Peter Kenton Living Room This house has normal parts, too! Catwalk (Same room as above, after rotating right.) These shelves are designed for cats to climb. Cat doors lead into kids' bedrooms. Kids' Rooms Beds are lofted. Hallway to other kid's loft. (With lockable door.) Cat door from living room. 6' closet below loft. Cable conduit to engine room. (For future computer desks, when they're older.) The other kid's room is a mirror image of this. Call Rooms Two call rooms allow taking meetings without bothering other people. Of course, they are also game stations. Cat Restrooms Exhaust fans Cat doors allow cats access to bedrooms when human doors are closed. Space under stairwells is dedicated to cat litter boxes. Guest Rooms We have two guest rooms for out-of-town visitors. The Roof Deck My favorite part of the house. 30-mile view Misting fan, great in the heat! Cat Cat Q&A About Us Whose house is this? We are Kenton Varda and Jade Wang . We've been married since 2014. This is our house, where we live with our two kids, in Austin, Texas. Kenton is a software engineer. He: Started and is tech lead of the Cloudflare Workers serverless compute platform. Co-founded Sandstorm.io (with Jade) Created Cap'n Proto Long ago, led the original open source release of Google's Protocol Buffers . Is: kenton@lanparty.house GitHub: @kentonv Hacker News: kentonv Bluesky: @kentonvarda.com Twitter: @KentonVarda Discord: kentonv Jade is an entrepreneur. She: Holds a PhD in neuroscience and did research at NASA Co-founded the Chez JJ hacker house network Co-founded Sandstorm.io (with Kenton) Was Head of Startups at Cloudflare Advises and invests in startups, particularly in Austin Was once a concert pianist Is: jade@lanparty.house GitHub: @jadeqwang Hacker News: qiqing Bluesky: @jadewang.me Twitter: @qiqing Discord: qiqing Who designed and built it? We bought the property as an empty lot and designed and built the house from scratch. The lead architect was Richard Va
Wholesome read. These guys are enjoying life and I loved reading the FAQ in the end, as well as them acknowledging they are very lucky!
God, imagine having a big enough friend group as an adult to justify an 18-gaming-PC LAN. These folks are doing something right
Oh hello! This is my house! Thanks for posting!
Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42156977
Unfortunately this new thread was posted while I was asleep, and so I haven't been online to answer questions as the thread developed. Whereas in the previous thread I participated from the start.
Pro tip to anyone whose stuff gets posted on HN: It is a completely different place when the author is present.
If you're present, then the people who are inclined to post cheap criticisms shy away, and the people who want to ask questions and learn show up.
(Aside from the house, I've had my work at Cloudflare posted many times, and seen this pattern in those posts.)
This LAN house was featured in a LTT video. There's an entire house walkthrough https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97Y0MVUgjOw
> We have efficient heat pumps and solar panels, but it's still a disturbing amount of energy usage and something I'm trying to debug. Perhaps we have too many windows letting in too much sunlight...
External window blinds work wonders with that - your AC doesn't have to work hard to get the heat out of the greenhouse you inadvertently built if you avoid the heat getting in in the first place. But yeah, these might be more widespread over here in Europe than in the US...
MTV used to have this show called Cribs where celebrities showed their house around and cars and everything. Basically bragging about their rich life. I have the same feeling opening this site. Maybe we need an MTV Cribs SV edition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTV_Cribs
Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42156977
This makes me really miss LAN parties. What an absolute gem of early PC culture that is sadly mostly forgotten? A reasonable replacement is phone gaming parties and I'm not kidding - it's really fun! We did Among Us phone LAN party recently and it was a blast.
The basement is awesome, but I would not feel cozy and welcome there. From the pictures it feels like any serverroom I've ever been into. Unwanted tips: Put some plants in there, some color, some wall-to-wall gaming art prints on the closet-doors and floors. <3
I really love the idea of having all the PCs in some place far away from where I, the human am sitting, but I don’t know how to do that. HDMI and USB cables can’t work over more than a few tens of feet can they? Or maybe these are special shielded cables, or sent down shielded cat6 cabling? Would love to have even more details on how to do this.
Also, since saying goodbye to my dad in hospital last year, whenever I hear about people enjoying time with their own fathers I feel really happy. I would have loved to build a house with my dad!