The Twitter Engineering Blog

Information from Twitter's engineering team about our technology, tools and events.

TSAR, a TimeSeries AggregatoR

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Twitter is a global real-time communications platform that processes many billions of events every day. Aggregating these events in real time presents a massive challenge of scale. Classic time-series applications include site traffic, service health, and user engagement monitoring; these are increasingly complemented by a range of analytics products and features such as Tweet activity, Followers, and Twitter Cards that surface aggregated time-series data directly to end users, publishers, and advertisers.Read more…

Using Twitter to measure earthquake impact in almost real time

With the help of researchers at Stanford, we used geo-tagged Tweets from around the world to measure earthquake impact in almost real time.Read more…

Twitter #DataGrants selections

Learn more about the six institutions we’ve selected to receive Twitter #DataGrants.Read more…

Scalding 0.9: Get it while it’s hot!

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It’s been just over two years since we open sourced Scalding and today we are very excited to release the 0.9 version. Scalding at Twitter powers everything from internal and external facing dashboards, to custom relevance and ad targeting algorithms, including many graph algorithms such as PageRank, approximate user cosine similarity and many more.

There have been a wide breadth of new features added to Scalding since the last release:Read more…

Manhattan, our real-time, multi-tenant distributed database for Twitter scale

Twitter has unique and intensive storage requirements. We built a database, called Manhattan, that meets those requirements and allows self-service access for our engineers.Read more…

Greater privacy for your Twitter emails with TLS

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Protecting users’ privacy is a never-ending process, and we are committed to keeping our users’ information safe. Since mid-January, we have been protecting your emails from Twitter using TLS in the form of StartTLS. StartTLS encrypts emails as they transit between sender and receiver and is designed to prevent snooping.Read more…

__attribute__ directives in Objective-C

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In this post, we’ll examine what __attribute__ directives are and how they can be used in development. The goal is to establish a value to using __attribute__ directives in any codebase and to provide a starting point with some directives that anyone can start using right away.Read more…

How To: Objective C Initializer Patterns

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Initializer patterns are an important part of good Objective-C, but these best practices are often overlooked. By being more rigorous and conforming to some best practices, we can save ourselves a lot of trouble. In this article, we’ll cover initialization topics in-depth, with examples to demonstrate how things can go wrong.Read more…

Netty at Twitter with Finagle

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Finagle is our fault tolerant, protocol-agnostic RPC framework built atop Netty. Twitter’s core services are built on Finagle, from backends serving user profile information, Tweets, and timelines to front end API endpoints handling HTTP requests.Read more…

Introducing Twitter Data Grants

Today we’re introducing a pilot project we’re calling Twitter Data Grants, through which we’ll give a handful of research institutions access to our public and historical data.Read more…

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