#ScalingTwitter

Saturday, 2 August 2014

More than 70 attendees came together at @TwitterUK yesterday for an evening of tech talks about challenges of scale, hosted by our women in engineering group, @WomEng.

VP of Inclusion and Diversity Janet Van Huysse kicked off the evening by talking about why diversity matters at Twitter, and what we’re doing as a business to help address the challenges we face in this field:

Sharon Ly was up next, with more details on @WomEng and the groups it supports.

After that, it was into the more technical talks, with Andy Hume leading us through the challenges of building TweetDeck, a front-end codebase at scale.

We then heard from Lucy Cunningham about Twitter’s streaming infrastructure and how Twitter delivers massive numbers of Tweets, in real time, to our partners.

Up next was Esteban Kuber with an overview of Twitter’s real-time, eventually consistent database, Manhattan.

Finally, Sharon returned with an overview of the life of a Tweet, from sending to appearing in your timelines.

We wrapped up the evening with a wide-ranging question and answer session, and an opportunity to network over drinks.

Here’s a selection of some of the evening’s Tweets:

The evening was the first time that Twitter’s @WomEng have run an event in London. It proved a fantastic opportunity to bring together people passionate about technology to explore the challenges faced by operating at scale, whilst also exploring the importance of diversity in the industry.