Meeting Developers In Their Existing Workflows: The Terrateam Advantage

Platform Engineering Podcast

Building infrastructure tooling doesn't require massive VC funding or a huge team - just ask Malcolm Matalka, co-founder of bootstrapped Terrateam. Malcolm shares his journey from real estate websites to investment banking to biotech, before landing in infrastructure automation.

Learn how Terrateam takes a unique "libraries over frameworks" approach to development, prioritizing simplicity and control by carefully selecting dependencies and building critical components in-house. Malcolm explains how this philosophy leads to more maintainable code and better security outcomes.

As an early participant in the OpenTofu fork, Malcolm provides insights into the community response and adoption challenges. He discusses how Terrateam helps teams streamline their infrastructure workflows by integrating directly with existing tools and processes rather than forcing new ones.

For platform engineers looking to simplify their infrastructure management, Malcolm describes the ideal Terrateam user as someone who wants infrastructure changes to flow naturally through their existing development process without added complexity.

Guest: Malcolm Matalka, Software Engineer, Co-Founder of Terrateam

As a co-founder at Terrateam, Malcolm enables teams to deliver infrastructure faster with their tools and services. They leverage Terraform and OpenTofu to automate, manage, and scale cloud infrastructure for developers and organizations.

With over 20 years of experience in software engineering, he has a strong background in cloud computing, distributed systems, and infrastructure.

Malcolm is also passionate about aerospace and bioinformatics, which led him to found Cosmo Labs AB and work as a software consultant at Abiogenesis Computer Systems Lab. At Cosmo Labs AB, they provided software solutions for satellite communication, orbital mechanics, and data analysis. At Abiogenesis Computer Systems Lab, they tackled bioinformatics challenges such as genome sequencing, protein structure prediction, and drug discovery. Prior to that, he worked for Spotify managing storage solutions at scale.

Malcolm Matalka - Reddit

Terrateam

Terrateam - LinkedIn

Links to interesting things from this episode:

• Erlang
• Riak
• Mnesia
• OCaml
• Puppet
• Tokio