With 2012 drawing to a close, Facebook celebrated its hacker culture by sharing its favorite hacks from the past year in a note on the Facebook Engineering page.
The social network highlighted:
- A giant QR code on the roof of one of the buildings of Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.
- A map that plotted which regions of the country root for which National Football League teams.
- Improvements to its events functionality.
- An LED display to track the social network’s attempts at curbing spam.
- Dipping a server into mineral oil to enable it to run at higher temperatures.
- Hack the Air, which enabled engineers working on a hackathon to access music playlists from GrooveShark, integrated with open graph.
- Creating a map of where people use Facebook and printing it on a 3-D printer.
More details on each hack are available on the Facebook Engineering note, which went on to say:
Facebook engineering had a busy year: We moved into our new campus in Menlo Park; retooled to focus on mobile; and launched some awesome products, including native rewrites of our iOS and Android applications, an updated nearby tab; and Facebook Gifts.
We also held 12 hackathons, generating products like full-screen photos, threaded comments, calendar view for events, and new languages for Facebook for Every Phone — all of which are now live on Facebook.
Readers: Which 2012 hack was your favorite?








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