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On-Call and First Responder: One Rotation to Rule Them AllOn-call is a requirement for at least some engineers in all SaaS companies. At least some of your customers will not have identical working hours to you. If your software fails to deliver what it needs to in that non-overlapping time, someone needs to fix it. If you’re on-call for a week: you may be less productive and more of a blocker for feature work. Combine this with a first responder rotation to also focus standard working hours on normally shared team non-roadmap work.
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Inside Modern Software Engineering with Homebrew’s Mike McQuaidSami is back this week with Mike McQuaid as they take a deep dive into the importance of open source maintainers.
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The impact of AI on open source software developmentFive experienced open source practitioners cut through the hype to ask what AI is actually doing to the communities, projects, and humans that keep open source alive.
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Getting Shit Done in InstitutionsDavid 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...
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Open Source Must Be Fun (Or It Will Die)I was on a call with a bunch of people involved in other prominent open source projects a few weeks ago. The organiser jokingly asked us to raise our hands if the previous six months had been better than what came before. I raised my hand. No one else did. Why? I’ve maintained Homebrew, the package manager for everywhere, for nearly 17 years. I’ve worked on it the vast majority of weeks in that time and I’ve never burned out. I’m having more fun than ever.
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Join the OSS Resistance with Mike McQuaidMike McQuaid discusses OSS Resistance: doing small amounts of open source work on company time, the risks involved and why it may help sustainability.
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In Memory of Jason RudolphMy friend and former GitHub coworker Jason Rudolph died in May 2026.
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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.
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Make GitHub Actions Do More For YouMost people just use GitHub Actions to run their tests. It can do far more: deploy a PR to production before merge, make release processes more robust and automate the boring chores you keep forgetting to do.
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Why is Windows 11 so disliked by programmers – and can Microsoft do anything to change things?“Stop trying to overrule my preferences on how to use my computer.”
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Performance Reviews, Done Right
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...
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Sandboxes and Worktrees: My secure Agentic AI SetupI’ve been using AI tools since early 2021 when I was invited to test out the Copilot internal alpha at GitHub (where I spent 10 years). I’ve maintained Homebrew since 2009. I’ve now personally hit the “AI writes 90% of my code” (Dario Amodei’s early 2025 prediction for late 2025). I’ve been asked by a few folks to detail my current setup so: here it is.
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Homebrew tightens tap security, begins work on its interface“It’s probably aimed a little more at newcomers than experienced Homebrew users.”
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Prompts Pranking PeersI’ve worked from home since 2009. One of (very few) things I miss about working in an office is the pranking potential. Zip-tying phone cables, rotating monitors, changing keyboard layouts, all that good stuff.
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Package Management Learnings from HomebrewHomebrew 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.
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My Parenting "Screen Time" PhilosophyLike 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.
