Twitter "the algorithm" Explained

Twitter open sourced its "algorithm" to their user's feed back in 2023. Zach Gardner, Chief Architect at Keyhole, was curious what architectural choices they made and why, so he decided to peek behind the curtain and see what he could find.

Algorithms are all the rage these days, and we as architects need to be aware of how they are structured, what constraints and SLAs they have, and why they made certain choices instead of others. Zach thinks it's 10x more effective than to learn from someone else's experience rather than making the same mistakes they did, especially if they are willing to share not just the answer they came to but why. Learning from super complex and very unique constraints, such as Twitter, is an amazing opportunity to expand your mind 🤯 and see things from a fresh angle. You may never use the same techniques that you find, but it always gives you something interesting to consider.

This presentation is a recording of a recent LinkedIn Live event, which covers:

💎 The steps of the pipeline, from when someone sends a tweet to how it lands in your feed
💎 An overview of the different languages and libraries they used to enable that pipeline to run over 5 billion! times a day
💎 Interesting code snippets Zach found...

If you're curious to get an architect's take on how an extremely large and complex system to take tweets and deliver them to a user's timeline is actually set up, check out this presentation.

Additional helpful links:
Understand the goals of the algorithm first
🔗   / twitter-recommendation-algorithm  

Then dive into the code
🔗 https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm
🤖 https://github.com/twitter/the-algori...

Want to learn more about Keyhole?
https://keyholesoftware.com/

#softwaredevelopment #architecture #programming #twitter #algorithm