Twitter University: Building a world-class engineering organization

Tuesday, 13 August 2013

As Twitter has scaled, so too has our engineering organization. To help our engineers grow, it’s important for them to have access to world-class technical training, along with opportunities to teach the skills they’ve mastered. To that end, we’re establishing Twitter University.

We want Twitter to be the best place in the world for engineers to work.

Twitter University builds on several existing efforts at Twitter. We currently offer employees a whole swath of technical trainings, from orientation classes for new engineers to iOS Bootcamp, JVM Fundamentals, Distributed Systems, Scala School, and more for those who want to develop new skills. Most of these classes are taught by our own team members, and many of them have been organized during our quarterly Hack Weeks –– a testament to our engineers’ passion for learning and education.

I’ve been inspired by these efforts. Being able to continually learn on the job and develop a sense of expertise or mastery is a fundamental factor in success in the technology industry and long term happiness at a company. Twitter University will be a vital foundation for our engineering organization.

To lead the program, we’ve acquired Marakana, a company dedicated to open source training. We’ve been working with them for several months. The founders, Marko and Sasa Gargenta, have impressed us with their entrepreneurial leadership, commitment to learning and technical expertise.

The Marakana team has cultivated a tremendous community of engineers in the Bay Area, and we look forward to engaging with all of you at meet-ups and technical events. Additionally, we’ll continue to contribute to open source software, and we aim to release some of the Twitter University content online to anyone who’d like to learn. You can keep up with Twitter University by following @university.

We want Twitter to be the best place in the world for engineers to work. Join us.

Update: Changed Twitter University’s username to @university