Open Engineering

Tuesday, 23 February 2010

Hi, I’m the other @evan, and I’m the infrastructure manager at Twitter. I want to tell you about the steps we’ve taken to make our engineering division more open and transparent.

First, we’ve created an open source directory for the entire company. This lists all the public software that the engineering teams have created or contributed to. Much of Twitter’s success has been enabled by open-source software, and we want to give back. Everyone is welcome to use this software for their own projects, and if the project is Twitter-related, so much the better.

We’ve also begun posting to our new engineering blog, which focuses on day-to-day engineering challenges. Subscribe to it if you’re interested in the development of Twitter internals. We’ll try to sample the full range of software development issues we face at a fast-moving company like Twitter. We already have posts about how local trends are organized, how we attack capacity problems, and how you can use our translation libraries.

Finally, we’ve updated our job descriptions to better reflect our company culture and the skills we’re looking for. My team is looking for performance, systems, and Ruby engineers, but the company is hiring across all groups, so check out our full listings.

To keep up with all these developments in one convenient place, just follow @twittereng on Twitter itself.