The Messy Reality of Shipping Helm 4 with Andrew Block
March 24th, 2026
40 mins 34 secs
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About this Episode
Tabitha sits down with Andrew Block, Distinguished Architect at Red Hat
and maintainer of Helm — the package manager powering Kubernetes
deployments worldwide — to talk about what it really took to ship
Helm 4.
They cover the 12-month journey to a major release, what got left on
the cutting room floor, how the team nearly broke a huge chunk of the
community with one dependency change, and why Andy thinks open source
is one of the most powerful forces for bringing people together —
regardless of what's happening in the world.
They also get into the bigger questions: maintainer burnout, the role
AI is starting to play in open source workflows, and what it means to
build software that outlasts the hype cycle.
If you use Helm — or you care about the humans behind the tools you
depend on — this one's worth your time.
Find Helm on GitHub, or join the community on Kubernetes Slack in
helm-users or #helm-dev. Developer meetings run every Thursday at
12:30 ET.
G-Research is hiring in Dallas, TX and London, UK! Apply at https://gresearch.com/vacancies.
For a video version of this podcast, check out https://youtu.be/mVKrrWOpMYM.
The GR-OSS OUT Podcast is produced by Ben Wiley.