With the entire world watching and waiting for the Facebook IPO, the company behind the world’s largest social network tried its best to celebrate while keeping the feeling of Facebook’s hacker roots alive. To that end, the same bell-ringing that signaled Facebook’s corporate status also ended its 31st all-night “hackathon.”

Last night, Facebook employees stayed up all night for the company’s latest hackathon, events where everyone in the company is encouraged and challenged to create and inspire each other. While normally the hackathons are focused around taking stabs at wild ideas for the Facebook website, or to hack the spaces Facebook has chosen to inhabit, last night’s hackathon looked more like a party to celebrate the company’s impending IPO.

Francis Luu, a product designer at Facebook uploaded dozens of photos to his Facebook account chronicling the event. To start off, here is Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself kicking off the hackathon celebration with a speech:

During the night, the chairs were cleared out of the courtyard for some intramural street hockey:

This LEGO wall hack just might be my favorite:

We may not see much of a result on the Facebook website coming from this particular hackathon, seeing as it was fueled by Anheuser-Busch:

The hackathon wasn’t all celebration, though. Employees did settle in with their laptops for some old-fashioned coding and design hacks:

You can see the rest of the photos over at Luu’s Facebook page. It will be interesting to see whether Facebook will be able to keep this sort of culture alive once it has to report to investors every quarter. The symbolism of the same bell ending the hackathon and signaling the beginning of Facebook’s corporate status was hard to miss.

(Photos courtesy Francis Luu)
(via Venture Beat)