Homebrew is a widely used package manager that simplifies the installation of open source software on Mac OS.

It was created in response to the growing demand for a lightweight developer-friendly tool suited to an increasingly Mac-centric development ecosystem.

Today, HomeBrew is a near-essential part of the MacOS software development toolkit.

Mike McQuay joined the project early on and collaborated closely with its creator, Max Howell.

He joins the podcast with Kevin Ball to discuss Homebrew's origins, architecture, its emphasis on automation and CICD, long-term sustainability, controversial tradeoffs, and much more.

Kevin Ball, or K. Ball, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for

engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego

JavaScript meetup, and organizes the

AI inaction discussion group through latent space. Check out the show notes to follow KBall

on Twitter or LinkedIn or visit his website, k to the show.

Yeah, excited to get to talk to you.

Let's maybe start with a little bit about you.

Can you talk about your background and then how you got into homebrew and where we're going to go today?

Yeah, sure.

So I feel like in tech, I've kind of had two lives, right?

So there's my, maybe a little bit like being a really rubbish superhero, right?

Where I guess my commercial job-related life, you know, I'm a guy from Scotland, I

interest in computers, did the computer science degree thing, got the tech job thing,

had been doing that since 2007, just, you know, like getting jobs, changing jobs,

paying the bills, having fun, all that stuff. But then there's my

open source life, which is generally what's of more interested people with homebrew and all that

type of background. So my love of open source, I guess probably started while I was at university.

...