Twitter University

School is back, no kids really it is! Well for social media development students it is anyway.  Everybody’s favourite micro-blogging website recently announced the opening of Twitter University.  The program is designed for engineers to get world-class technical training and gain the abilities to teach the skills which they have already mastered.


Chris Fry, senior vice president of engineering, said in a recent blog post: ”We want Twitter to be the best place in the world for engineers to work” The social networking company already offers its employees an array of training opportunities, ranging from orientation classes to iOS Bootcamp courses.  These are taught by team members in an effort to develop a new skills set. “I’ve been inspired by those efforts,” Fry said. “Being able to continually learn on the job and develop a sense of expertise or mastery is a fundamental factor in success in the technology industry and long term happiness at a company.”  Twitter University will be vital for the company’s engineering department, he said.

To help run this program, Twitter has purchased an open-source training company called Marakana.  The company’s founders Sasa and Marko Gargenta have been teaching classes at the social network headquarters for several months now and “have been continually impressed by the engineering leadership, the company’s commitment to learning and the cultural fit between our two companies” they said.  Over the past ten years, Marakana has developed courses on HTML 5, Java, Android, Scala, Python, Hadoop, jQuery and other languages, delivering classes to more than 100,000 professional software engineers.

Developers are able to keep up with classes by following @TwU; the account already gained more than 700 followers since it launch.  That’s great for software developers, but what about us mere mortals?  Well, Twitter will eventually be releasing some of the University content online for anyone who would like to learn!