From hacking Pokemon websites to harnessing Helm and Terraform: An OSS contributor's journey

Corey Regan

DevOps Engineer & OSS Contributor

Terrateam Helm Chart Contributor

As an open-source project, Terrateam relies on the expert contributors who take time out of their day to help build, improve, and maintain our software. These dedicated pros are instrumental in driving innovation and continuously improving our platform.

But what inspires them to do this? We talked to one of our contributors, Corey Regan, to learn about what motivates him to be an OSS contributor.

Where it started: Pokemon, petitions and baseball associations

Corey's story is a testament to the innate human desire to create.

"I started off probably when I was around nine or so," he recounts, "Pokemon was all the rage back then, and I really wanted to make a Pokemon website. So, I stole someone else's website, you know, right-click, view source, and started playing with the code to figure out how it all worked."

Encouraged by his father, Corey then tried his hand at building a new website.

"My dad was like, 'Oh, that's interesting. I guess you can make websites. Why don't you make a website for this petition to the school board to clean up the mold in the roofs?' And so I made that website. Fast forward a couple of years after that, and I made a website for the baseball association I was a part of."

This early, hands-on exploration laid the foundation for a lifelong passion.

A passion for building and problem-solving

However, Corey's trajectory wasn't linear, and after school, he took a "180" into construction.

However, the early mornings of pipefitting and plumbing weren't for him, and he soon returned to the tech sector.

Working at a data center that also handled web hosting and ISP services, Corey immersed himself in networking, web hosting, and troubleshooting. It was here that a guiding principle solidified:

Every time I saw a problem that wasn't already solved, I would just go ahead and solve it.

This problem-solving ethos, coupled with his inherent builder's spirit, became the driving force behind his eventual foray first into individual contributing, and then into open source.

Finding like-minded people in open source

Corey's transition to open source was fueled by his genuine sense of gratitude and a desire to make things better.

While many of his early open-source contributions involved fixing bugs or adding small features to existing software, his involvement with Terrateam was different.

"With Terrateam specifically," he explains, "I was impressed and thankful for you guys, because I was looking at doing something very similar: running Terraform through GitHub Actions and having a conversation through comments on what to do."

Seeing Terrateam execute this vision in a way that was "legit and well done" inspired Corey to contribute back, a sentiment rooted in his "willingness to help try and make it even better, to leave it better than how you found it" ethos.

I was impressed and thankful for you guys, because I was looking at doing something very similar: running Terraform through GitHub Actions and having a conversation through comments on what to do.

The impact of his contributions, particularly to Terrateam's Helm chart, has been significant. Terrateam's co-founder, Josh Pollara, underscores this.

"That was very helpful to me because I don't have a lot of Kubernetes or Helm experience. And that Helm chart is now being used by our best customers. That's really impactful to Terrateam as an organization and even on our commercial side."

The added benefits of OSS contribution

Beyond the direct impact on projects, open-source contributions have also helped Corey get recognized by employers.

"Part of one conversation was to share a PR that you're proud of, where you contributed to open source, and I used the Terrateam Helm chart PR."

This anecdote highlights the growing recognition of open-source contributions as a powerful indicator of a developer's skills, initiative, willingness to go above and beyond, and commitment to the wider community.

It also gives anyone who's interested a tangible example of your code-writing skills.

Lessons learned while navigating open source

The transition to open source, particularly with larger projects, presented its own set of challenges.

Corey describes the process as, "definitely in most cases, a lot slower. Especially when you contribute to big things."

The layers of checks and individuals involved, coupled with the necessity of signing contributor agreements, all contribute to a more deliberate pace.

On the other hand, the public aspect of open source offers a unique advantage.

People can come and see what I have contributed to others, whereas, when working for a private company, that code never sees the light of day. It's the secret sauce of the business.

This transparency allows contributors to build a public portfolio of their work, fostering a sense of pride and professional visibility.

Corey's work on an Azure SQL provider exemplifies this. Faced with basic and limited existing providers, he chose to invest "half a day" to "learn a new language, which in my case was Golang."

This decision was a "win-win-win for everybody," enabling him to learn a new skill, contribute back to the community, and benefit his work.

Corey's hot takes on monorepos and Terraform state

We asked Corey for his hot take, and (unprompted) he said something that really resonated with what we feel at Terrateam:

You don't need to split up your monorepo. If a monorepo does not work at scale, it means you haven't done enough work to make it work.

This directly challenges a prevalent belief in the DevOps community, which often advocates for splitting monorepos as infrastructure grows.

Corey believes that "everybody has been brainwashed on Terraform thinking that once you hit a certain size, you've got to change it all up and the hot take is, uh, no, Terraform itself is flawed, and there's a better solution."

This "brainwashing," he argues, stems from the inherent limitations of Terraform's state management, which can become unwieldy at scale.

This is where Terrateam's Stategraph enters the conversation.

As Josh Pollara adds, "Terraform was developed in 2015. The state files were smaller, the infrastructure was smaller. We've grown out of that. It's 10 years later. But we need something better."

Stategraph is the upcoming solution to these inherent scaling problems, replacing the flat state file on Terraform and OpenTofu with a database-backed graph to remove the bottleneck. With Stategraph, independent changes will be able to run in parallel, and the state will become queryable and auditable.

Conclusion

Corey Regan's journey is a reminder of the impact individuals can have in the open-source world.

His story underscores the importance of curiosity, a problem-solving mindset, a desire to create and the willingness to challenge established norms.

From his early days of dissecting Pokemon website code to his hot take on Terraform scaling, Corey embodies the spirit of innovation that drives the DevOps community forward.