Twitter University: Building a world-class engineering organisation

Twitter has acquired Marakana, a company that provides open-source training, as part of an effort to develop new skills among its engineers. 

The deal, which was announced Tuesday in a blog post, will lead the formation of a new development programme at the social network dubbed “Twitter University.”

Twitter already offers training opportunities, ranging from orientation classes for new engineers to iOS bootcamp and courses in Java virtual machine coding. Twitter University will build on these offerings to provide a wider range of learning opportunities in the area of open-source coding.

For instance, to help engineers brush up their skills, Twitter University will offer technical classes like Android Internals and Python Bootcamp, according to a recent tweet.

Marakana has already been teaching classes at Twitter for several months, according to its website. The San Francisco-based company says it has delivered courses in Android, Java, HTML5 and other languages to more than 100,000 software engineers.

Terms of the Marakana acquisition were not disclosed.

Twitter has doubled the number of its employees four times over the past three years. “As Twitter has scaled, so too has our engineering organization,” said Twitter engineering senior vice president Chris Fry.

Twitter University aims to give Twitter engineers access to “world-class technical training along with opportunities to teach the skills they’ve mastered.” The program will constitute “a vital foundation for our engineering organisation,” Fry said.

The university won’t be an actual physical building, but rather an expanded set of programs and classes, a Twitter spokeswoman said. The Marakana team will join Twitter’s engineering organization to build Twitter University.

Twitter said it will release some of the Twitter University content online for others to use.