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Sue Tran cracks eggs as she preps breakfast for the South by Southwest strangers invited into her home by her son.

AUSTIN, Texas — What would your mom say if you said you were going to turn your house into a five-day, revolving-door youth hostel with beds in every room and even in the walk-in closets? What if you used Twitter to invite anyone at South by Southwest who needed a place to stay, and left the door unlocked 24/7?

“I’m just trying to help their dreams come true,” says Chang in a Vietnamese accent as she cuts up hot dogs and scrambles eggs at her home here. In the next room, SXSW Interactive badge-holders are passed out after a late night of work and partying.

“I’m trying not to disturb them, but I have to feed them,” she says.

Every March, thousands of tech professionals, filmmakers, musicians and media types swarm into Austin for SXSW, the annual conference that’s grown to outlandish size over the past 25 years. The sea of web and app developers who descend on the city during the Interactive segment of the conference, which ends Tuesday, turns SXSW into a kind of spring break for geeks, with constant parties raging and hotel rooms selling out quickly.

In this turbulent environment, Sue Tran’s motherly spirit and willingness to open her home to strangers has turned her into a patron saint of temporarily homeless coders.

Will Tran says that’s just how his mom is — it’s part of her Taoist beliefs. She escaped Vietnam on a boat during the war and spent time in terrible conditions in a refugee camp in the Philippines, an experience that made her want to help the less fortunate.

His dad was less enthusiastic about the idea of turning the Tran homestead into a SXSW flophouse but agreed to the proposal. He used to work at Motorola and is enthusiastic about the technology scene.

“I told him to think of it as knights of the roundtable, where you have to help each other out, ” says Will Tran. “I know how hard it is to book hotels [during SXSW].”

When I visit the Tran household, the few people awake are not waking up — they are still up from the night before. They report that fireworks, guitars and heavy drinking kept the backyard hopping most of the night. All this in a sleepy suburb of Austin.

Will Tran participated in the StartupBus competition, leaving from his home in San Francisco on a two-day ride to Austin that was filled with nonstop business development. Before he left the West Coast, he let everyone know the Tran door was open if they needed a place to stay. The only crashers that took him up on the offer were StartupBus refugees.

In the gallery above, step inside the Trans’ geek crash pad and marvel at an epic triumph of mom-itude.

Photos: Keith Axline/Wired.com