Twitter wants to make sure its engineers are some of the best around, and in order to assure that they’ve just acquired an open source training company to help.
The company is Marakana, a company that has developed courses for Android, Java, HTML5, Scala, Python, Hadoop, jQuery and others over the past 10 years. Marakana also boasts that they have delivered classes to over 100,000 software engineers and their free online tutorials have reached over 5 million others.
The Marakana acquisition is going to help Twitter build Twitter University, the company’s new program for training their engineers in all of the latest skills.
“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,” says Chris Fry, Twitter’s SVP of Engineering.
“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.”
He says that Twitter University will help their engineers “develop a sense of expertise or mastery.”
To help @TwitterEng continue to develop their skills, we’ll offer technical classes like Android Internals and Python Bootcamp.
— Twitter University (@twu) August 13, 2013
“Today, we’re excited to announce our next chapter at Twitter: we’re thrilled to be joining their engineering organization to build Twitter University. We began teaching classes at Twitter several months ago and have been continually impressed by the engineering leadership, the company’s commitment to learning, and the cultural fit between our two companies,” said Marakana in a statement.
