Facebook's Legendary Hackathons

I worked at a very large, boring, and bureaucratic fortune 500. Our little team got into the tradition of "hack nights" which happened every Thursday. We'd come in at a regular time, work until somewhere between 4-10am the next day (yes, 20-26 hours of work) and then go home for a long weekend.<p>It turned into a thing of legend around the office. VPs and the CIO would crack jokes about it during meetings and stop us in the hallways to ask about our hack nights. When our team wrapped up the project and we moved on to different groups some of us were asked to run hack nights for those teams.<p>Hackathons are a healthy thing for a company to do. It lets people relax and get to know each other better and it creates a strong sense of camaraderie. I'm happy to know FB has taken this idea and ran with it but I'm also surprised that I don't hear about more companies in the valley doing these sort of activities.

I like our implementation of hackathons at Chartbeat, which is a week-long hackathon every 6 weeks. Some of our most loved products and features have come out of them.<p>I wrote a little blog post about it once, if anyone cares: <a href="http://blog.chartbeat.com/2012/03/16/hacking-chartbeat/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.chartbeat.com/2012/03/16/hacking-chartbeat/</a>

I'm surprised they only order from Jing Jing in Palo Alto. I mean, it's a great place but there are lots of other good places too. (Hunan Garden on El Camino comes to mind).