Facebook (News - Alert) will celebrate its IPO doing the one thing it knows best – coding under conditions of sleep deprivation.

The all-night hackathon has been a Facebook tradition dating back to the very first dorm room headquarters. Now that the company is a force in several industries, the event is still an integral part of office culture at Facebook.

On Friday morning, Mark Zuckerberg (News - Alert), company founder and CEO, will ring the bell to open trading on the NASDAQ, and for the first time Facebook stock will be bought and sold publically.

The original investors are expected to net billions of dollars when the company goes public, so they will celebrate with an all-night coding party called a hackathon at Facebook's Menlo Park headquarters. Over a thousand Facebook employees have RSVP’d to an event indicating their participation.

Facebook hackathons are always colorful affairs, blending nerd culture, caffeine and turbocharged creative productivity into a beautiful few hours. Lately, as Facebook has achieved legitimacy among internet businesses, the events have been covered heavily by popular media.

While the term "hacker" collected a negative connotation during the dotcom boom, companies like Facebook, which are run by technophiles and hackers, have reclaimed it.

“The word 'hacker' has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers,” Zuckerberg said. “In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I've met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world."

Facebook hackathons give employees the chance to focus on their more farfetched, underdeveloped ideas. These bursts of creative exploration often lead to a handful of real products that get implemented into the Facebook ecosystem. Facebook chat and the first version of timeline are both products of a Facebook hackathon.