Hear, hear.
Much like Amazon and Google and Microsoft and IBM, no matter how much you may hate these companies or their products, in order to build those big products, a
lot of smart and dedicated engineering talent and hard work have gone into their
foundations that, especially if they're contributing to open source, which many of them are,
other unrelated engineers around the world benefit from. They lift
everyone up. Twitter engineers have pushed hardware and software in some really interesting places, and that thread is a great summary of some of them.
Also, thank you for linking through Nitter.
I've used Nitter more than a few times to try to read things like this.