Homebrew and macOS Package Management with Mike McQuaid

Homebrew is a widely used package manager that simplifies the installation of open source software on macOS. 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 McQuaid 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 trade offs, and much more. Kevin Ball or Kate Ball is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He cofounded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI in action discussion group through Latent Space. Check out the show notes to follow Kay Ball on Twitter or LinkedIn, or visit his website, kball.llc. Mike, welcome to the show. Hey. Thanks for having me, Kevin. Yeah. Excited to get to talk to you. Let's let's maybe start with a little bit about you. Can you talk about your background and then how you got into Homebrew and and where we're gonna 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 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. I've 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 interest to people with Homebrew and all that type of background. So my love of open source, I guess, probably started while I was at university. Like, I I came to university. I heard about, you know, when I was in high school, people talking about installing Linux on the machine the same way that you might talk about, you know, taking illicit drugs or whatever. It was this kind of, like, risky, dangerous, sort of, like, somewhat admirable thing. So, yeah, so I got to university, like, a bit of a kind of Windows power user. I have not done meaningful programming really, like, beyond just trying to get games working like a peer and, you know, peer pressure happened pretty quickly. And I was like, okay. I need to get on the install Linux on my desktop bandwagon. Right? So got Linux on my desktop machine, got, like, a little home server of an old computer running my parents' house so I could, like, send data back and forth and all this type of stuff. And yeah. And, obviously, you know, desktop Linux, one of the nice things about it I mean, probably …