Queen’s “Under Pressure” blasts from the speakers in Facebook’s Building 18 Cafe. A DJ spins on one side of the room, and on the other end there are two kegs of beer next to a rack of granola bars, chips, and snacks. It’s a set-up that would make total sense for a dance party, were it not for the clusters of engineers ripping up their laptops, fingers tapping away at code.
This is no casual Silicon Valley feel-good party. This is the scene at Facebook’s 32nd hackathon, where company engineers and even interns are hoping to create the next big product features for the world’s most popular social network.
Wired received an exclusive, inside look at the first few hours of Facebook’s first hackathon since the company went public in May. But what makes this hackathon especially unique is its extended, multi-day length. Dubbed Camp Hackathon, the event takes place across three days and two nights, which means employees literally set up camp (yes, with tents) at the Menlo Park campus.
This event is Facebook’s 4th annual Camp Hackathon, a summer hack for the company’s full-time employees and interns to all get together and innovate with abandon. The only rules: You can’t work on anything that’s part of your day-to-day job, and if it’s your first hackathon, you must hack. Sticking to traditional hackathon culture, there’s a whole lot of coding and little to no sleep.
“It’s like a sleepover but for nerds,” Amy Zhou, Facebook privacy intern and Princeton senior, tells Wired. “Except without the sleep.”
So how much gets accomplished in a three-day sleepover for nerds? At Facebook, a whole lot. And accomplishments aren’t limited to senior-level engineers. One of Zhou’s fellow interns, Matthew Dierker, is working on a feature that’s already been vetted by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Dierker, a sophomore at the University of Illinois, is on a Platform Growth team that’s working on making Facebook games better and more engaging for users. While he couldn’t talk about the details of his project (and, in fact, all employees were coached not to reveal any secrets), Dierker said that he started it at an intern-organized hackathon. His project is getting great reception from people at Facebook, he said, and that it will “hopefully” launch soon.
“Where else can you make something overnight with free Red Bull? And make something that ships to 900 million people? Nowhere else,” he said. “That’s just amazing to be able to do.”
Much of the high spirits and energy levels of Camp Hackathon can be attributed to the Wednesday night kickoff, a bit of corporate street theater by Facebook employees Pedram Keyani, Blaise DiPersia, Roddy Lindsay and Bubba Murarka. The foursome march into Building 18, singing a Camp Hackathon song. DiPersia mans a megaphone. Lindsay is dressed in what appears to be a camp leader uniform. The rest are wearing this year’s official Camp Hackathon T-shirt.
The four men joke about how the first Camp Hackathon started in 2009, during the swine flu pandemic, and how they didn’t want an intern to catch any viruses and infect Facebook’s servers. (Nerd joke alert!) Later, Keyani tells the crowd that if Murarka messes up his part of the kickoff, he’ll have to do 10 pushups right then and there. And yes, Murarka does stumble at one point. People start chanting “Pushups! Pushups!” Murarka is a good sport and obliges the crowd.
In the end, Keyani reminds everyone of the end goal: On Friday at 2 p.m., Camp Hackathon ends with a prototype forum, where everyone can demo what he or she has accomplished in the 43-hour event. Five or six of the projects will make their way to an even smaller demo in front of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer, VP of Product Management Chris Cox, and other higher-ups. And with that, Keyani yells, “Let’s go fucking hack!”
It’s a surprisingly goofy kickoff that illustrates the type of culture Facebook wants to maintain.
Source: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/07/facebook-gears-up-next-big-thing-in-three-day-camp-hackathon/
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