Meet Keith Thompson, lover of Lizzo, Terraform and Head of Engineering at Conjura.
- What I’m reading/ watching / listening to:
I’ve become obsessed with Benn Stancil’s substack. Coming from a more typical engineering background, Benn’s writing has helped keep me in tune with what the data engineering world is currently worrying about. For podcasts I’m enjoying The Analytics Engineering podcast by dbt Labs, The Blindboy podcast and The Anfield Wrap. Pretty much all my interests, data, engineering, current affairs / pop culture and football. As for my taste in music, the likes of MUNA, Lizzo, Christine and Queens and Red Hot Chili Peppers currently occupy my On Repeat playlist.
- Interesting thing I’m pondering:
The concept of time is an intriguing one. For example I always find that years in my memory are so much more compressed than my concept of the years before I was born. So for me 2016 was 4 years ago, I can’t explain why but it just makes sense. This is why facts like the below always catch my interest.
- Vice City was set in 1986 and released in 2002. That is equivalent to a game being set in 2006 being released this year.
- The Phantom Menace is now a year older than Star Wars: A New Hope was when the Phantom Menace came out.
- Interesting work happenings:
I am biassed, but Engineers at Conjura are always building really cool products. One of our core values is to run less software, biassing heavily towards serverless technologies. This lets us punch above our weight, we are still a small team, but we are mighty!
- Work shoutouts:
The newcomers to the Senior team! Francesca, Paul and Fiona come with lots of experience and I’ve already enjoyed working with them in the short time they’ve been here. Especially because their arrivals signal how far we’ve come with the development of our product and the prioritisation of our internal culture. (Psst, read more about our new additions here.)
- Things I’m learning about:
I’ve really gotten into Terraform recently which is a tool for building and versioning infrastructure as code. Terraform providers allow you to interact with cloud services like AWS, Snowflake or other APIs. There is a really fun Terraform provider for Spotify, which enables you to manage your Spotify playlists! This year I want to try my hand at building my own provider to define sound presets for some of my music gear.
