Mark Zuckerberg Vows To Code Every Day This Year

When you're a man like Mark Zuckerberg, apparently, running one of the most popular websites in the world just isn't enough of a challenge.

Facebook's young CEO has set an interesting, yearly goal for himself since 2009, the year he wore a tie to work every day. After learning Mandarin in 2010 and eating only meat he's killed himself in 2011, Zuck has pledged this year to return to his geeky roots: coding.

According to a recent Bloomberg Businessweek report, Zuckerberg has vowed to code every day of this year, a challenge that may very well serve him good. Last September, Feross Aboukhadijeh, a former Facebook intern and the creator of YouTube Instant, shared an anecdote with New York Magazine describing Zuck having trouble coding for Facebook's Group feature as the team prepared the product for its launch in 2010.

Now, after two years of focusing on Facebook's enormous growth, we wouldn't be surprised if Zuck was still a little rusty with his coding. With that in mind, perhaps this is the perfect time for him to brush up on his skills; as Bloomberg's Douglas MacMillan points out, freshening up his programming chops may help Zuckerberg ground his engineers and, in MacMillan's words, help Facebook "keep its cool factor as it becomes a publicly-traded giant."

What do you think of Zuckerberg's new pledge? Let us know in the comments!

Related on HuffPost:

Flip through the gallery for a look at 6 people Zuck burned on his way to the top.

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• The Winklevoss Twins

  The infamous Winklevoss twins have been giving Mark Zuckerberg grief ever since Facebook's launch back in 2004. The pair and a business partner (more on him later) commissioned Mark Zuckerberg to program a social networking site they had founded called ConnectU, but they later alleged in a lawsuit that Zuckerberg ripped off their idea and launched Thefacebook (later, Facebook) instead. After settling with the company for $65 million in cash and stock, the twins claimed that Facebook misled them about the value of the company's stock. They appealed the settlement <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/16/winklevoss-twins-appeal-denied-circuit-court_n_862758.html" target="_hplink">all the way up to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court</a> -- just one appeal shy of the Supreme Court -- before <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/22/winklevoss-twins-facebook-lawsuit_n_882618.html" target="_hplink">throwing in the towel in June 2011</a>.

• Divya Narendra

  Divya Narendra partnered with the Winklevoss twins on their ConnectU project during their time at Harvard. Narendra fought Zuckerberg in court alongside the twins and <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/21/connectu-co-founder-launches-professional-investment-community-sumzero/" target="_hplink">founded his own investor community, called SumZero,</a> before claiming his share of the $65 million settlement with the social network. A plotline in the film "The Social Network," which dramatized Facebook's founding, portrayed the Harvard students' working relationship and subsequent fallout with Zuckerberg.

• Eduardo Saverin

  Here's another name you probably recognize from "The Social Network." The film portrayed Zuck's deteriorating friendship with Facebook co-founder and fellow Harvard student Eduardo Saverin, culminating in a blatant betrayal on the part of Zuckerberg that ended his working relationship with Saverin. <a href="a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-booted-his-co-founder-out-of-the-company-2012-5?page=1" target="_hplink"" target="_hplink">A new piece by Business Insider indicates</a> that Saverin may not have been as much of a victim. As noted by BI, Zuckerberg planned to cut Saverin out of the company because he had failed to secure funding or set up a business model and had used the social network to run free ads for Joboozle, a side-project Saverin had developed. (<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-booted-his-co-founder-out-of-the-company-2012-5?page=1" target="_hplink">Business Insider also published emails and instant messages</a>, purportedly written by Zuckerberg, that shed light on the methods Zuck used to oust Saverin and dilute his shares in the company.) After a 2009 settlement with Facebook, Saverin retains an <a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/eduardo-saverin/" target="_hplink">estimated five percent stake in the company</a>. (His original stake was higher than 30 percent.) He recently <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/11/eduardo-saverin-us-citizenship_n_1510099.html" target="_hplink">renounced his U.S. citizenship</a>, presumably to avoid the capital gains taxes on the profit he stands to make off Facebook's imminent IPO.

• Sean Parker

  Napster creator Sean Parker, who also served as Facebook's first president, played a huge role in the development of the social network. <a href="http://nymag.com/news/features/mark-zuckerberg-2012-5/index3.html" target="_hplink">According to Henry Blodget's recent profile of Mark Zuckerberg</a>, Parker was also instrumental in securing Zuck's power over the company. However, <a href="http://nymag.com/news/features/mark-zuckerberg-2012-5/index3.html" target="_hplink">as Blodget explains</a>, despite Parker's contributions, Zuck and the company cut him loose a year after his arrival due to his "<a href="http://nymag.com/news/features/mark-zuckerberg-2012-5/index3.html" target="_hplink">party-boy ways</a>."

• Owen Van Natta

  Zuckerberg also had a hand in the departure of Owen Van Natta, Facebook's former chief operating officer and the <a href="http://allthingsd.com/20080219/owen-van-natta-to-leave-facebook/" target="_hplink">mind behind big deals</a> like Microsoft's $240 million investment in the social network. "His greatest strength was deal-making, not management," <a href="http://nymag.com/news/features/mark-zuckerberg-2012-5/index3.html " target="_hplink">writes Henry Blodget</a>. "In early 2008, in the wake of the disastrous launch of an advertising product called Beacon, Facebook's senior team determined that the company needed a different kind of executive running the business." <a href="http://allthingsd.com/20080219/owen-van-natta-to-leave-facebook/" target="_hplink">AllThingsD's Kara Swisher notes that</a> Van Natta had long been gunning for a CEO spot, which he was unlikely to find a Facebook. "He has said to me many times that he had been hesitant to come to Facebook then, as he had been looking for a CEO job at the time," wrote Swisher when Van Natta left Facebook.

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Comments

[KC Recchio]

04:05 AM on 06/27/2012

but why code sarah goodin? @[33:13] = sarah goodin.. 33:13.. illuminati......

[MFierstos]

08:21 AM on 05/20/2012

Mazel tov

[clearthinker2008]

08:01 AM on 05/20/2012

He should do something important, like use some of those billions to seriously help find a cure for cancer or something. Facebook isn't important to life, and neither is his pledge to code.

[Aby]

03:56 AM on 05/20/2012

Hey Zuckerberg, here's something else you can do. Figure out what went wrong when someone at Facebook choose to ban the Walkers from posting a tribute to their terminally ill infant.

[rt1027]

06:28 AM on 05/20/2012

who cares.......who gets banned

[clearthinker2008]

07:58 AM on 05/20/2012

Aby.

[dede4007]

12:26 PM on 05/20/2012

You BETTER care. God forbid you have a serious problem and want people to take notice, but then you are condemned for it and penalized. There are a whole lot of WORSE things on facebook than the picture of this poor baby who couldn't help how he was born. People putting pictures of themselves in sexual poses and very personal things that shouldn't be shown to the world get posted and nothing is done about it, but this baby born with a birth defect is banned. This whole world is sick.

[farleft1917]

09:40 PM on 05/19/2012

He should code:

/**
* The PayNoCorporateTaxApp class implements an application that
* simply prints "Taxes R 4 little people!" to standard output.
*/
class PayLessTaxApp {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("I Screw Y'all!"); // Display the string.
}
}

Then he should self delete.:)

[psandysdad]

03:43 PM on 05/18/2012

Like he will ever top himself. You invent Facebook. Where do you go from there? (Besides the bank.)

Besides, he could fall into 'code rage'.

[addisonsteele]

03:43 PM on 05/18/2012

When I saw the web page headline, I began to wonder whether he is going to try to develop a personality.

[tumbler snapper]

03:29 PM on 05/18/2012

Why "code", let alone work at all? He sounds rather like the lottery winner that vows to keep their job as a grease monkey at the local muffler shop.

[decimus]

02:13 PM on 05/18/2012

Seems like the people who got "burned" are still all multi-billionaires, multi-millionaires at worst. Wish I could get burned like that.

[thoreau101]

02:07 PM on 05/18/2012

Love the T shirt. Classy.

[hftank]

01:51 PM on 05/18/2012

Geeky he is the Antichrist . Who can gather the masses better than he. Think about it long and hard the scary power he has over people.

[Frank Torres]

01:21 PM on 05/18/2012

I think any goal made by a 28 yo billionaire is a good one. How much coding per day? Like 5 minutes?

http://www.orlandopolitics.net/

[tumbler snapper]

03:41 PM on 05/18/2012

Even the five minutes worth would be quickly and quietly discarded by some underling.

[Duane7]

01:19 PM on 05/18/2012

Hopefully coding will be his Zen time after dealing with all the stresses of being CEO and a billionaire. I find that to true for game testing. Although I'm poor and out of work I still game test to reduce the daily stresses. I've been at it for a decade and it's a hard habit to break. I daily use the computer as a test of my mental sharpness and persistence. I'm sure he will too. It is a good place to release those tensions without causing upset with others.

[clearthinker2008]

07:59 AM on 05/20/2012

You care that much about the "stress" of a billionaire? lol

[Duane7]

10:55 AM on 05/20/2012

Actually, yes. If he has a life well directed he can be a force for major change to the good. I hope Mark has a good life that he uses for good. I'd be very happy to see his wealth go as Carnegie did late in life by building libraries all over the country. We need benevolent wealth to make big changes. The evil of the Koch brothers show wealth wasted. They has a chance to right the insanity of their father but instead they out did him. All that money and time wasted.

[SFGiantsfan]

01:14 PM on 05/18/2012

Look at all the haters....hilarious.

[MFierstos]

08:26 AM on 05/20/2012

Not only is he THE American Dream, he is now the target of American distane, why? I sat good on him...

[snookasnoo]

09:40 AM on 05/20/2012

Learn something about what a sleaze Zuckerburg is.

[Zewee]

01:04 PM on 05/18/2012

Hard to tell, it's coded...