One of Facebook’s longest standing traditions is the “hackathon,” an all-night event complete with beer, food, loud music, and yes, hacking. GigaOM reports that Facebook has extended this practice into a program it calls a “Hackamonth,” a new initiative that allows engineers who have worked on the same project for more than a year to leave their team and work on a side project of their choosing.

“For engineers, hackathons are opportunities to dive into any other project they’ve had their eye on. It’s a chance to shake things up for a night,” says Slater Tow, a spokesperson for Facebook. “Hackamonth is a way to perpetuate this hackathon mentality into a full month.”

Similar to Google’s 20 percent ^[1] time program, this program aims to prevent burnout among the staff and also spark new innovations within the company more often. Deals, Facebook’s new feature unveiled last month, was actually born out of three pilot Hackamonth projects. Read more from GigaOM ^[2].