Mike McQuaid

Great post here from Andrew, particularly on why Homebrew doesn’t need a NPM-style cooldown.

Should be obvious but seems it’s not: don’t spam OSS maintainers or coworkers with AI code you’ve not reviewed yourself.

For coworkers only, sometimes fine explaining your testing and why reviewed isn’t necessary e.g. a one-time script.

It’s hard to understate just how much more productive coding agents are at some tasks in YOLO mode. Essential to have a good sandbox for this, though. My favourite so far is sandvault: no Docker nonsense needed.

The year is 2068. All matter in the solar system has been consumed for energy. All energy is used for the system’s sole remaining purpose: AI generation of another new frontend for Homebrew.

The author and I are convinced AI is net positive in engineering today but worth engaging seriously with the downsides.

They are actively promoting it by taking money for putting these links at the top of the page. How many times does something need to be mentioned or reported for the same keyword before someone thinks "maybe we should stop taking money for this"?

I guarantee there are others that have been blocked.

Google continues to take money for malware pretending to be Homebrew installation.

There’s nothing Homebrew can do about this. Google needs to fix it.

Please put me in contact with someone at Google high enough level to actually fix it.

Andrew nails here many parts of what actually makes OSS maintaining hard work.

Empathy is needed more for OSS sustainability than money.

“This new technology will replace developers!” is not a new thing.

Nice look at what some previous claims were (and how they resulted in more developers and more software).

Great take about the cultural requirements to create “10x engineers”

sounds like fun! email me!

I gave a talk: Package Management Learnings from Homebrew

Homebrew 5.0.0 released in 2025. Walk through the major changes in 5.0.0, improving expectations based on other package managers and what they can learn from Homebrew's approach.

I gave a talk: What happened to RubyGems and what can we learn?

Lessons for non-Ruby projects on non-profits, governance, money and access in open source, drawn from the RubyGems dispute.

All the “faster Homebrew in Rust” projects are a bit like parsing HTML with regex.

The simplest use-cases seem to work, it’s easier and there’s just edge cases to fix.

Fixing these edge cases requires recreating Homebrew and using Ruby (which will be slower again).

How Homebrew Became Mac’s Package Manager with Mike McQuaid

Interviewed by Screaming in the Cloud.

This analysis was both helpful and hurtful.

Another reminder to focus on a single task and ship to completion whenever possible.

The Most Important Skills Going Forward with CTO + Homebrew Maintainer Mike McQuaid

Interviewed by .

“The Failure Mode of Clever (is asshole)”

Applies to some OSS commenters I’ve seen…

Great take from John Scalzi (who also writes GREAT sci-fi books).

Raising kids in an addictive internet without losing your mind (or theirs)

Anil has a decent framework here for thinking if you’ll actually be happy in a job.

Great and nuanced take from creator of Redis.

If you’re still in the “these tools are useless” camp or “these tools are unethical so I won’t use them”: you’ve not understood how things have already changed.

I like this take on how to get promoted.

My experience has been that promotions come from finding and doing important work.

Being spoon-fed is fine for juniors but a negative signal for those seeking e.g. staff+ promotions.

I find myself referring too often to the “is it worth the time?” xkcd.

This works best when the person doing the automation is also the person saving the time.

It’s that time of year again to look at your calendar like Marie Kondo and ask:

“Does (this (meeting) spark joy?”

If not: try to cancel or shorten it.

Would love it if people expressing strong opinions about open source declared what project(s) they’ve maintained and for how long.
Would help weed out the uninformed.

Strongly agree with “The Move Faster Manifesto”.
This matches my experiences at GitHub, Homebrew, Workbrew.
You can also be fast and sustainable.

brianguthrie.com/…

Minimum Viable Management - YouTube Minimum Viable Management is a podcast where Mike McQuaid and Neha Batra talk about the messy, human side of engineering leadership. From one-on-ones and fee...

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Workplace politics aren’t optional. Ignoring them just hands power to someone else. In our latest Minimum Viable Management episode, @mikemcquaid.com and Neha are joined by @deniseyu.bsky.social to talk about political capital, allyship and how leaders and senior ICs can use influence responsibly.

I agree with Sean here.
The industry default seems to be “idealistic about engineering, cynical about management”.
Things work better if you’re a little cynical about both.

This analysis of Valve’s approach to hardware was really interesting.
I have bought all their hardware and will likely buy all the new stuff and this helps explain why.

https://www.garbagecollected.dev/p/valve-the-reverse-apple