On Tuesday, Twitter announced its latest acquisition – Marakana, an open-source technical training firm.
Posting on the Twitter blog, Chris Fry – Senior Vice President of Engineering at Twitter, says Marakana will be critical to the microblogging company’s new effort called Twitter University.
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.
Fry says his company wants “Twitter to be the best place in the world for engineers to work.” To that end, Twitter University builds on several existing efforts by the microblogging giant.
“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,” he says. “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.”
To lead the program, Twitter acquired Marakana.
“We’ve been working with them for several months,” Fry concluded. “The founders, Marko and Sasa Gargenta, have impressed us with their entrepreneurial leadership, commitment to learning and technical expertise.”
