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.