Great post here from Andrew, particularly on why Homebrew doesn’t need a NPM-style cooldown.
nesbitt.io
Package Managers Need to Cool Down
A survey of dependency cooldown support across package managers and update tools.
-
What happened to RubyGems and what can we learn?
31 January 2026
Lessons for non-Ruby projects on non-profits, governance, money and access in open source, drawn from the RubyGems dispute. -
Package Management Learnings from Homebrew
31 January 2026
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. -
How Homebrew Became Mac's Package Manager with Mike McQuaid
27 January 2026
Interviewed by Screaming in the CloudMike McQuaid explains how Homebrew grew from a side project into macOS’s de facto package manager and how the project is sustained today.
-
Getting Shit Done in Institutions
24 January 2026
Minimum Viable Management
David Yee, VP of Engineering at The New York Times and head of its new AI platforms and products mission, joins Mike McQuaid and Neha Batra for a candid, behind-the-scenes conversation about why institutions are built to resist change and what to do about it. They dig into hidden norms, choosing the right battles, translating “how things really work” and creating stability for teams while you deliberately destabilize the system just enough to move it forward.
-
The Most Important Skills Going Forward with CTO + Homebrew Maintainer Mike McQuaid
16 January 2026
Interviewed by freeCodeCamp PodcastMike McQuaid joins Quincy Larson to discuss career lessons and the software engineering skills worth prioritizing next.
-
My Parenting "Screen Time" Philosophy
13 January 2026
Like many people who now work with computers, I was told as a child I spent “too much time on screens” and then built a career out of it.
-
Performance Reviews, Done Right
09 January 2026
Minimum Viable Management
Performance reviews have a reputation for being stressful, confusing and often disconnected from reality. Too often they surface feedback that should have been shared months earlier or reduce a year of work into a single rating. In this episode, Mike and Neha unpack why reviews fail and how managers can turn them into a useful summary instead of a shock.
They explore what companies expect from performance reviews, what managers struggle with and what employees actually want to hear. The conversation covers documenting early signals, balancing positive and critical feedback, avoiding ruinous empathy and ensuring no one walks into a review surprised by the outcome. They also discuss practical ways to give feedback throughout the life of a project, align on growth goals and handle mismatches between perception and reality. A grounded, experience-based discussion for anyone responsible for giving or receiving feedback.
-
Politics at Work Without Losing Your Soul
29 December 2025
Minimum Viable Management
In this episode, Mike and Neha are joined by Denise, an engineering leader and former colleague from GitHub and Pivotal, to unpack the reality of workplace politics and why ignoring them is not a neutral choice. Drawing on Denise’s LeadDev talk and hard-earned lessons from management and senior IC roles, the conversation explores political capital, information asymmetry, allyship and the idea of “table flips” as a finite currency.
Together they discuss when to spend influence, when to hold it back and how privilege shapes who gets heard. From advocating for promotions to using power responsibly on the way out of an organisation, this is a practical and candid look at how to navigate work under capitalism without burning out or selling yourself short.
-
Beyond Engineering: Healthy Tension
19 December 2025
Minimum Viable Management
Product, design and engineering rarely agree and that’s a good thing. In this episode, Mike McQuaid and Neha Batra break down what healthy tension actually looks like, why alignment is overrated and how leaders can turn disagreement into better outcomes.
-
POSSE, Blog and Feed Updates
18 December 2025
I’ve been following what Justin Searls has been doing with his blog for some time. He’s been leaning into the “POSSE” (Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) philosophy more and more. In practice, this looks like building your own version of a single-serving social network on your own site and exposing RSS/Atom feeds to other services to consume. Justin recently released POSSE Party which makes this easier by cross-posting to various social networks. I’ve complained for a while about (anti)social networking so I’m always up for new ways to use social networking less.
-
Software Estimation Choices
09 December 2025
The process of software estimation is frustrating for software engineers and those who consume their estimates. Consumers often ask “why can these software engineers not just tell me when it will be done?”.
-
When Things Go Wrong: How Leaders Rebuild Trust
14 November 2025
Minimum Viable Management
Mike and Neha explore how leaders can recognise when things are going wrong, why admitting mistakes builds trust, how to spot low psychological safety, and the value of written plans, accountability and steady course correction when guiding teams through tough moments.
-
Creating and Keeping Momentum
31 October 2025
Minimum Viable Management
Mike McQuaid and Neha Batra break down how leaders spark momentum and keep it steady. They start with clarity of mission, ruthless scope cuts, and visible wins in weeks not years. They cover simple not easy systems that reduce drag, like milestone slices, anti-goals, handoffs that follow the sun, and temporary process as guardrails you later remove. They show why constraints breed creativity, how to automate recurring pain, and why teams should target low volatility over peak velocity. They close with saying no, letting the right fires burn, and building a candid culture through trust and social capital.
-
Good Things Take A Long Time
24 October 2025
In tech, 3 years is often considered a “long tenure”. We maintain open-source projects for 2 years, then burn out. We start habits, lose momentum and quit.
-
Psychological Safety vs. Telling the Truth
23 October 2025
Minimum Viable Management
How can teams feel safe to speak up while still hearing hard truths? In this episode of Minimum Viable Management, Mike McQuaid and Neha Batra explore what it really means to balance psychological safety with direct, honest communication. They discuss the practical work of rebuilding trust in teams, the role of consistency and humility in leadership, and how to make openness a habit, even when conversations are uncomfortable.
They also touch on remote work, written communication, and when individual contributors should share their opinions in decision-making. A candid look at how safety and honesty can, and must, coexist for teams to thrive.
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.
https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-patterns/anti-patterns/
simonwillison.net
Anti-patterns: things to avoid
Agentic Engineering Patterns
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.
https://github.com/webcoyote/sandvault
github.com
GitHub - webcoyote/sandvault
Run AI agents isolated in a sandboxed macOS user account
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.
https://tomwojcik.com/posts/2026-02-15/finding-the-right-amount-of-ai/
tomwojcik.com
What AI coding costs you
What's the effect of the prolonged AI usage among coders and is it tracked correctly, if it all?
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.
https://github.com/Homebrew/install/issues/1074
github.com
Google keyword `brew` points to a malicious site with false Homebrew install instructions · Issue #1074 · Homebrew/install
your problem was from running the official install or uninstall script? you carefully read the output and it was not a git fetch or other connection issue to GitHub (that Homebrew has no control ov...
Andrew nails here many parts of what actually makes OSS maintaining hard work.
Empathy is needed more for OSS sustainability than money.
https://nesbitt.io/2026/02/13/respectful-open-source.html
nesbitt.io
Respectful Open Source
Maintainer attention as a finite resource.
“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).
https://www.caimito.net/en/blog/2025/12/07/the-recurring-dream-of-replacing-developers.html
www.caimito.net
Why We've Tried to Replace Developers Every Decade Since 1969
Every decade brings new promises: this time, we'll finally make software development simple enough that we won't need so many developers.
Great take about the cultural requirements to create “10x engineers”
https://randsinrepose.com/archives/sometimes-your-job-is-to-stay-the-hell-out-of-the-way/
randsinrepose.com
Sometimes Your Job is to Stay the Hell Out of the Way
I wrote a piece a long time ago about the mythical 10x engineer, except that they aren't a myth.
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).