I had a good experience at the devHouse Boston event last weekend, which was my first time at one of these events. It was ~30 people in the Boston area that got together on different 1-day projects. There were a lot of different skillsets in the room, and it was great to immediately get the feedback of more experienced people when problems came up. More personally, I now have a better understanding of skills I need to further develop to be a web app hacker. I also spoke with a couple hackers that I may work with later.

If you're in the Boston area, I may help organize a monthly devHouse event, depending on the level of interest. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30824