Twitter's Latest Acqui-Hire Drives Continuing Education for Employees How far would you go to keep your employees' skills sharp? Twitter went ahead and bought a whole company.
By Brian Patrick Eha •
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Twitter's engineers are getting a chance to upgrade their brains.
On Tuesday, the social network announced that it had launched Twitter University, an internal company initiative to provide its engineers with new programming skills.
"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," Chris Fry, Twitter's senior vice president of engineering, wrote in a company blog post.
Continuing education is apparently so important to Twitter that it was willing to acquire an entire startup to make it happen. In his post, Fry disclosed that Twitter had bought Marakana, a company developing open-source training for software engineers. Marakana founders Marko and Aleksandar Gargenta have joined Twitter and are spearheading the Twitter University program.
Naturally, the program has its own Twitter account. It promises to provide discussion and sharing of ideas around emerging technologies. And in keeping with Marakana's open-source principles, Twitter plans to make some of the Twitter University content available online for anyone who wants to learn from it, Fry said.
Twitter did not disclose the terms of the Marakana deal.
Related: 3 Ways You're Derailing Your Employees' Productivity
