The archive · Work & Ways of Doing · Operational decision · 2007–2012
Facebook hackathons: overnight coding sessions spawn the Like button
Facebook makes all-night hackathons official in 2007; engineers build anything, and the best prototypes — Like, Chat, Timeline — ship.
What it had to solve
Facebook was adding users and employees fast, and Zuckerberg wanted to preserve the energy of the Harvard 'lockdown' coding nights. Hackathons became an official tradition so product ideas could come from anywhere in the company, not just the roadmap.
How it works
Facebook's all-night coding tradition goes back to the Harvard dorm days, when Zuckerberg and his co-founders ran 'lockdowns' to ship the site to new colleges. As the company grew, it made the ritual official: hackathons, where anyone can spend the night building ideas outside their day job.
At a hackathon in July 2007, a team including Andrew Bosworth and Leah Pearlman prototyped what was then called an 'awesome' button — the idea first appeared in internal emails under 'Project Codename Props' that month. Zuckerberg rejected it in November, worried it would cannibalize sharing, so it stayed on the shelf until February 2009, when the Like button officially launched.
The pattern repeated: Facebook Chat and an early version of Timeline also came out of hackathons. By the 2012 IPO, Facebook was holding its 31st all-night session, with more than 500 people coding at 4 a.m. and Zuckerberg hosting the kickoff.
Why it lands
- A regular all-night ritual lets engineers work on what they care about, not just the assigned roadmap.
- Demoing at sunrise creates fast feedback: working prototypes beat decks, so good ideas surface quickly.
- Shipping hackathon winners signals that bottom-up ideas are a real career path, not a hobby.
- The Like button shows a rejected prototype can still become the company's defining feature once timing and naming click.
What it did
The Like button became the web's most copied engagement mechanism; hackathons also produced Facebook Chat and the precursor to Timeline. By the May 2012 IPO, Facebook was running its 31st hackathon with more than 500 employees coding through the night.
What you can take
Give people time to build things nobody asked for; a regular, low-stakes ritual can out-produce the roadmap, because the best ideas often arrive from outside it.
Since then
The Like button spread across the web as the default reaction UI, and the hackathon model was copied by companies everywhere. Meta kept the tradition, though the button's engagement effects later drew criticism that the 2007 builders never anticipated.
Sources
- Facebook: Hacking All Night to an IPO
- Zuckerberg Didn't Like The 'Like' Button At First, But Now He's Banking On It
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