Kief Morris (he/him) is a distinguished engineer at ThoughtWorks. He drives conversations across roles, regions, and industries at companies ranging from global enterprises to early stage startups. He enjoys working and talking with people to explore better engineering practices, architecture design principles, and delivery practices for building systems on the cloud. Kief ran his first online system, a bulletin board system (BBS) in Florida in the early 1990s. He later enrolled in an MSc program in computer science at the University of Tennessee because it seemed like the easiest way to get a real internet connection. Joining the CS department's system administration team gave him exposure to managing hundreds of machines running a variety of Unix flavors. When the dot-com bubble began to inflate, Kief moved to London, drawn by the multicultural mixture of industries and people. He's still there, living with his wife, son, and cat. Most of the companies Kief worked for before ThoughtWorks were post-startups, looking to build and scale. The titles he's been given or self-applied include Software Developer, Systems Administrator, Deputy Technical Director, R&D Manager, Hosting Manager, Technical Lead, Technical Architect, Consultant, and Director of Cloud Engineering.
