Mike McQuaid on the Greatest Lessons He’s Learned in Over 16 Years at Homebrew

Homebrew’s project lead Mike McQuaid joins Abby and Andrea to unpack what it really takes to sustain one of the most-used developer tools on macOS and Linux. From early GitHub workflows to today’s automation and guardrails, Mike details the soft-power leadership that keeps volunteers motivated, and shares insights on how to scale contributions, keep a small maintainer team effective, and triage with empathy (and boundaries). This episode covers governance, “saying no,” using AI responsibly, and how IRL feedback at Universe turned into performance wins. Links mentioned in the episode: github.com/github/spec-kit Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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Mike McQuaid on the Greatest Lessons He’s Learned in Over 16 Years at Homebrew is an episode from The ReadME Podcast by GitHub.

This episode is 00:32:08 long.

This episode was published on Oct 7, 2025.

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