At Facebook, we believe that every engineer has a great idea within them. We had a Hackathon last week, and it was a chance for each engineer to surface this idea and spend a night cranking away on it.
Hackathon is a chance to work on the ideas we have been thinking about for last couple of months, to change the "That would be hot!" sentiment to something real and live on the site. The objective is to create something interesting by the end of the night that you can get feedback on from your peers and coworkers.
There were some rather memorable moments of this Hackathon. A fridge stocked with Red Bull kicked off the evening. When projects were announced at the opening gather-round, I realized what a rich pool of talent we have in the office and was anxious to see what the night would produce.
There was the 2am feeding frenzy during which 40 burgers were devoured in about three minutes. And to top it all off, there was a breakfast run to IHOP that took us about 2 hours to get served. My advice: Don't roll in 45 deep to an IHOP at 6am.
The best story ever showed up on just about everyone's News Feed around 5am.
Watch out for some cool things to come out of our most recent Hackathon. "Photos of you and friend," an iPhoto exporter, and Ajax-ed wall posts (so you can post on a friend's Wall without leaving the profile page) were all made over the course of the night. Other fun additions were the ability to access Facebook on a Nintendo Wii!
There were plenty of other great ideas that may make their way into the site or into other projects over time…Facebook pets still might not happen, but someone got to spend the time on it, just because they wanted to.
Aditya is a Facebook engineer. His Hackathon project isn't going to be released on Facebook...yet. 
