About the Show

Two engineers, one microphone, and an industry that never stops surprising us.

Software Madhouse is a regular podcast about the joy, absurdity, and occasional existential dread of building software for a living.

Each episode we dig into the real stories behind the code: the architecture decisions that aged badly, the incidents that taught us everything, the tools we love, the tools we tolerate, and the people who keep the whole circus running. No vendor pitches, no hustle-culture nonsense — just two engineers talking honestly about the craft.

Whether you’re a seasoned principal engineer or just wrote your first for loop, pull up a chair. It’s a madhouse in here, and you’re very welcome.

Meet the hosts

Matt Farina

Co-host · Software Architect & Technical Leader

Matt has been building software for more than three decades, on everything from embedded systems and vehicle diagnostics to front-end development to cloud native infrastructure — and lived to tell the tales. He leads portfolio architecture and community work, maintains Helm and Artifact Hub, and has contributed to Kubernetes, OpenStack, Rancher Desktop, and Drupal along the way. He co-wrote Learning Helm and Go in Practice, speaks at conferences regularly, and has been making podcasts since well before this one.

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Robert Sirchia

Co-host · Open Source Communities & Cloud Native

Robert leads open source ecosystem and community work and has spent over two decades in technology, most of it in the .NET and Microsoft world before following it into the cloud — from Cloud Foundry to Kubernetes. He’s a Helm core maintainer, community manager for Kubewarden, and a regular conference speaker, and he’s led large modernization efforts across real estate, finance, energy, and politics. He still codes for fun, and when he’s not in a terminal he’s outdoors, at a tabletop, or cooking something ambitious.

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