Next up in profiling the amazing folks behind Rival IQ: Keith Moore, one of our software engineers.
Who are you?
I’m Keith Moore, AKA “Keith Mo,” which is what many people seem to know me as. Where to start? I’m an engineer here. Mostly back-end server, infrastructure-y things. I’ve spent most of my career working on components that don’t demo well. When I’m not here working, I’m probably home with my wife Kasia and our four cats, or out on a stupid long bike ride with the Seattle Randonneurs.
What makes you excited to work at Rival IQ?
Mostly the people I work with, some of whom I’ve known for a very long time. Seth Pollock, one of the founders, and I worked together at Microsoft. So, I’ve known him for, let’s say twenty years or so and Shep, John Clark, and Seth Bridges for about ten years. And all the other people, even the very, very newbies are all great here.
When you are in charge of Wednesday lunch, what are you most likely to order for the office and why?
If we go out, my favorite place to go is Von’s, but that’s a bit of a hike. We’re getting into good weather, so it will be nice to go for a walk once in a while. As for ordering in? You know, I kind of hate that. It’s nice that we sit around and do our metrics meeting, or sprint planning, or whatever and share lunch together but the food is generally kind of uninspiring. Maybe I’m uninspired when I select. I think Cassandra (our Senior Product Marketing Manager) has a line on really good barbeque. I may ask her for advice next time I’m on point. I grew up in Texas, so barbecue is near and dear to my heart.
How do you use data in your day-to-day?
I love riding bikes and do everything from the mundane commute to and from work to big rides, including a really big ride I have coming up this weekend. I record everything with GPS and upload to Ride With GPS and Strava. I have probably about ten years of data there. I’m not quite sure what to do with it all.
Interesting. Can you visualize any of that data?
Strava has some cool tools for that, like a heat map that shows you where you’ve been.
Do you have your count of miles?
Total? Just on the GPS is 32,000-ish.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah, that bike broke at about 29,000 miles. It’s currently at the factory for repairs. It will ride again.
Do have a favorite Rival IQ feature?
The boosted post detection is one of the geekiest science project things we have. Doc (nickname for one of our co-founders, Seth B.) has a lot of experience in machine learning. He and Seth P. set up this machine learning architecture so that we can train it with posts we know are boosted to the point where our software can recognize a boosted post.
My other favorite is searching for keywords and hashtags and stuff like that, because I do a lot of the work on the back end on the server to keep it running and happy. It’s a nice feature that works really well, and people use it all the time.
I use that so often! So, we talked a little bit about how you use social media. Can you share more about how you use different channels?
I regularly post photos, mostly of bike rides or my cats, to all the channels. I usually post to Instagram then let “If This, Then That?” do the grunt work of forwarding the post to other channels. I use Facebook mostly for contact with my family and friends. I’ve got a lot of friends who are on Facebook, and my bike club (Seattle Randonneurs) is big on Facebook. I seem to have a huge number of bike friends that I met on Twitter, many of whom I never met in person. There’s a weekly Twitter chat thing, “Bike School,” where there’s a designated professor and everybody asks questions and answers. It’s very entertaining. I met a lot of great people this way.
How can people find you on social media?
I’ve got a website, Keithmo.com, where the front page links to all my social media presences. Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google Plus, Rival GPS, Strava, RUSA, UMCA (The Ultra Marathon Cycling Association): everything is there.
Is there anything else you want to share with the readers?
Every once in a while we’ll get a customer who’s in the bike industry, which is super exciting for me personally. I’m often tempted to go into fanboy mode and tell them “I see you’re using our tool–yay!” Nothing like that. It’s just cool to know.
If you want to talk bikes or back-end development, reach out to Keith on Twitter or Instagram.