The Hacker Way is alive: Behold the results of Facebook’s 2013 hackathons

Facebook still loves its Hacker Way. In an engineering blog post today, the company showed off a few of the products it has built in Hackathons this year. They might not be as huge as other features Facebookers have built during hacking events in previous years, but they’re still cool.

Adding the weather to an event listing makes sense. Attending an event implies hauling yourself out into the wild, and Facebook engineers chose to help give people an idea of what conditions they’ll face if they go. The weather is meant to be accurate down to an area within a city, not just the city itself.

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And now it’s possible to show snow falling in the little circle showing your Facebook friend’s face on Facebook Messenger for Android, thanks to the work of engineer Richard Zadorozny.

Users can now join up to contribute to shared photo albums.

But not every hack yields results that Facebook users can see. In early 2013 some engineers came up with a system to “automate maintenance of our infrastructure without impacting site functionality.” It became the starting point for a tool that schedules upgrades for hardware infrastructure. That tool now saves time for Facebook network engineers.

And a hackathon at Facebook’s office in London has resulted in a data visualization widget that can show how new features consume the battery life and CPU inside Facebook users’ mobile devices.

Judging by the looks of these and other products of Facebook’s hackathons this year, the social network seems to be sticking to its “move fast and break things” motto.

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