TL;DR; Dark, piss, stained alley was very intimidating but I am made it to VHS, met awesome people been coming back for 5 years.
I was running a maze solving robot competition in 2008. I was visiting all the different geek clubs I could find around Vancouver to drum up support and people to submit robots. One of the clubs that I visited was BCIT robotics club where I met Dallas (forumer VHS founder and BoD and now Co founder at Maker labs) . He told me about VHS and I should come down sometime to check it out.
At the time VHS was located in the dark piss stained alley behind 45 west hastings. After circling the block a few times trying to find the front entrance I gave up and went home. The next day I talked to people on IRC and they told me that I had to enter via the back door in the alley and if I got lost again I could call the VHS phone number. It took me a few weeks to try again.
My first night at VHS was when Dallas was teaching people about HACK-n-tosh and @lukec was talking about open data (he hadn’t even started https://recollect.net/ yet. @flyingoctopus was talking about buttons and laughing (it was his seconed time being at the space). Austin was talking about web of trust systems and this new thing called BitCoins. Goldfish was installing home made magnetic trip sensor on the front door and connecting it to a parallel port on a computer.
I was hooked, I been back almost every week since then. Amazing people, Amazing times, So many good friends. So much hacking!