Engineering @ Twitter

AgendaAbout me

About Twitter

Growth Engineering @ Twitter

Working @ Twitter

Things I wish I knew 5 years ago

About @PhilYoussef

#AboutTwitter#AboutTwitter

So what is Twitter?

The social network that is ConstrainedPublicReal TimeGlobal

Changing News

Changing Politics

Changing TV & Advertising

A dynamic business

#growth#growth

Twitter is rapidly growing

400M+Unique visitors / month

200M+Active users

2006 2012

400M+Tweets per day

Source: Twitter internal data

And the conversations are growing too

1,000,000,000 Tweets

Source: Twitter internal data

Then: 3 years, 2 months and 1 day

Now: every ~2 days

60%Access Twitter on a mobile device

40%Mobile quarter over quarter growth

Source: Twitter internal data, Q1 2012. Access Twitter on mobile device means users that have logged in via mobile at least once in a month

Mobile growth powers our platform

Source: Pandora S1, Twitter, Facebook, Q411 Twitter Internal data

A conceptual model for growth

UsersUsers Active usersActive usersActive usersActive usersSignupSignup Active usersActive usersActive usersActive usersActive usersActive usersActive usersActive usersActive usersActive usersActive usersActive usersActive usersActive usersActive usersActive users

Easy right? Wrong!

•Top of Funnel - bring people to Twitter - bring people to Twitter

•Activation - help users understand Twitter- help users understand Twitter

•Retention - make them stick around- make them stick around

•Resurrection - bring back inactive users- bring back inactive users

•Top of Funnel - bring people to Twitter - bring people to Twitter

•Activation - help users understand Twitter- help users understand Twitter

•Retention - make them stick around- make them stick around

•Resurrection - bring back inactive users- bring back inactive users

Dig Deeper

corecore

newnew casualcasual

resurr.resurr.

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inactiveinactive

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User State Model

Growth Engineers

Full-stack• Mobile, Pig, Scala, Java, Ruby, Javascript, HTML

Product sense

Metrics driven

Entrepreneurial

#jointheflock#jointheflock

Engineering @Twitter

We have a diverse stack• Scala, Java, Ruby, Pig, Javscript, HTML, CSS

• Android, iOS, Web, Distributed services

We use open-source

We give back to open-source• Bootstrap (web UI framework)

• Storm (distributed realtime computation framework)

• FlockDB (distributed graph database)

• http://github.com/twitter

Innovators Patent Agreement

PeopleWork with the best and brightest from around the world

Coming from the best schools:• Canada: McGill, Waterloo

• US: Stanford, MIT, Harvard, CMU

• India: IIT Bombay

• China: Tsinghua University

• Many more

Coming from the best companies:• Google, Amazon, Pixar, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook

#Culture

Small TeamsBIG Impact

#HackWeek

@Twoffice

#Perks

#Celebrities

#JoinUs!

Engineering Jobs

New Grad• Software Engineer - http://t.co/DIY

• Data Scientist - http://t.co/DIYds

Follow instructions there to apply

Intern positions opening up in next couple of weeks

#questions#questions

#LessonsLearned#LessonsLearned

Engineering Interviews

2 phone interviews

4-6 on-site / Skype interviews• 3-4 for interns

Algorithm questions + live coding• More on this in a bit...

Interviewing1. Language

2. Study Material

3. Do it on Paper

4. Time

5. Focus Areas

6. Bread & Butter Algorithms

7. O(N) everything

8. Talk & Approach

Read my article “Hacking the coding interview” at www.restlessprogrammer.com

LessonsBuilding a portfolio• EDBC

• Build portfolio: Code publicly on github, blog

• Internships

• Read: news.ycombinator.com, reddit.com/r/programming... etc

Immigration• Personal choice

• If you choose this route, learn the law

• US: San Francisco, Seattle, NYC, Austin

• Canada: Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver

• International: London, Berlin, Shanghai\Beijing

LessonsRoles in Software engineering• SWE

• PM

• DS

• EM

• QA/SDET

• Design

• UX

Startups vs Big corporations

It’s the people that matter

#questions#questions