Twitter acquires open source educator Marakana for internal 'university'
Twitter is in the process of building its own engineering education program, dubbed Twitter University.
To move things along quickly, the microblogging giant announced that it has acquires Marakana, a private company that provides open source tech training.
Specifically, Marakana has taught courses about Android, Java, HTML5, Scala, Python, Hadoop, and jQuery, among other languages and platforms.
According to the Marakana team, the company has taught more than 100,000 professional software engineers in classrooms along with another five million through free online coursework.
Both based already in San Francisco, Marakana will be integrated within Twitter for internal purposes -- meaning it will not be offering these courses to individuals and organizations any longer.
The Marakana team pointed toward NewCircle, another open source training program described to be populated many former Marakana instructors.
As for Twitter University, Chris Fry, senior vice president of engineering at Twitter, explained in a blog post on Tuesday that the program will essentially tie up a number of loose ends, led by the Marakana team going forward:
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.
Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.