Curriculum Vitae

Mike McQuaid

Workbrew CTPO and Homebrew Project Leader

Early GitHub employee (2013, #232) and Homebrew maintainer (2009, #3). Wide experience building software at extreme scales (since 2007). Published author of Git in Practice and speaker with >45 talks across international conferences, keynotes and workshops.

I work from my home in Edinburgh, Scotland and will never consider moving or commuting to another city, sorry!

Experience

Workbrew (2023 - Present)

CTPO and Cofounder, leading product and engineering. Built initial version of Workbrew Console, Agent and Installer. Hired world-class product and engineering team. Ran and implemented SOC2 compliance process.

Homebrew (2009 - Present)

Project Leader and longest-running maintainer. Invented Homebrew binary packages (bottles) which were featured in Apple’s Touch Bar MacBook Pro keynote and are used by Google, Microsoft and Facebook. Fix users issues, plan roadmap, create and manage security program, make new releases, teach new maintainers and contributors and develop features in Ruby and Bash. Started a successful Kickstarter project which was funded in two hours to create a Jenkins CI system for Homebrew. Installed servers into data-centre and keep them running. Ran and mentored people in several Google Summer of Codes a MLH Fellowship and an Outreachy for Homebrew to successfully attract new maintainers. Brought Homebrew into the Software Freedom Conservancy for 501c3 non-profit status in the USA and financial sustainability. Organised first ever Homebrew maintainer meeting. Migrated Homebrew to GitHub Packages which required extensive changes and collaboration in both Homebrew and GitHub.

GitHub (2013 - 2023)

Principal Engineer (2022 - 2023)

Lead for the Merge Queue project, migrating GitHub’s monolith to using it, improving deployment throughput by ~33% to 1.7k PRs merged in 30 days which also measurably improved internal developer satisfaction. Solving engineering-wide developer productivity/experience and architecture problems. Documented heuristics on when internal teams should build in the Rails monolith vs. a microservice. Working with GitHub’s OSPO to improve internal and external open source project management tooling. 20th most prolific contributor to GitHub’s Rails monolith, out of 1276 people, in my 10 years working there.

Staff Engineer (2020 - 2022)

Designed and built tooling for automated service and team ownership within the GitHub.com Rails monolith for code review, issue triage and service-based on-call rotations. Use my expertise in developer experience/productivity and open source software to provide internal product feedback and mentorship to other engineers across the company, resulting in multiple promotions. Lead the migration of GitHub engineering to Codespaces, further improving productivity of all GitHub-employed engineers, after investigating porting our monolith’s build system to support M1/ARM Macs but finding it to be too unstable. Optimised setup of the GitHub.com Rails monolith saving ~375 developer hours a week (or: at least 9 engineers 40-hour work weeks). Sunset GitHub Jobs and provided a framework for sunsetting other, underused GitHub features. Migrated Homebrew to GitHub Packages which required extensive changes and collaboration in both Homebrew and GitHub.

Senior Developer Advocate (2016 - 2018)

Improved GitHub for open source (collaborating with Google, Microsoft and Facebook) conceiving and building Open Source Friday and the archiving repositories feature, helped build Open Source Guides and other GitHub open source programs. Ran open-source maintainer events and built a maintainers community on GitHub for product feedback in return for early-access betas of new features. Wrote internal and external blog posts, spoke at conferences and to the press about GitHub’s open source programs. Collaborated extensively with Nadia Eghbal who credits and references me in her book Working In Public.

Senior Engineer (2013 - 2016, 2018 - 2020)

Technical lead on GitHub Sponsors. Setup, participated in and trained others on on-call application, first responder and ops/infrastructure rotations. Improved marketing organisation productivity building new JSON, Kafka and Go micro-services. Improved database performance, process and tooling. Built Strap (replacing Boxen) reducing development downtime for all engineers. Improved API and webhooks by fixing bugs, building process and conceiving new APIs. Hired to improve the quality of GitHub Enterprise and measurably improved it through bug fixing and improving manual QA, CI, packaging, deployment, automation and ChatOps for the release process.

AllTrails (2012 - 2013)

Full stack engineer developing Rails/MySQL back-end and Coffeescript/SASS front-end for AllTrails and AllSnow. Developed features, APIs and optimised performance. Setup Jenkins CI and automatic Chef deployment for Rails and mobile applications HockeyApp deployment. Managed and improved AWS EC2 infrastructure.

KDAB (2009 - 2012)

Technical team lead providing international Qt/C++ cross-platform consultancy. Led teams who always delivered on time and in budget. Generated successful sales leads and sold a six figure contract (with no previous sales experience). Travelled internationally to train software engineers, solve hard problems and kick off projects to consistently positive customer feedback. Created a new Buildbot/CPack based CI system to improve company productivity.

Mendeley (2008 - 2009)

First non-founder employee and lead developer for Mendeley Desktop Qt/MSVC++ application, which I ported from Windows to macOS and Linux. Setup all servers. Implemented continuous delivery and deployment through Buildbot and CPack packaging for all OSs. Designed, ran interviews and personally recruited three engineers. Successfully rewrote problematic contractor code. Designed, implemented the REST protocol between Desktop and Web.

BT (2007 - 2008)

Created record-breaking high-performance network analysis applications in C on the IBM Cell Processor. Taught others about and setup Subversion version control, Buildbot continuous integration and Trac issue tracker. Won a place on the graduate scheme.

Google Summer of Code (2007)

Worked on the KDE Qt/C++ project. Improved the KBlog XML-RPC API for KDE 4.0 API freeze. Added rich-text support and posting of journals (as blog posts) from KOrganizer which was released in KDE 4.1.0.

Wolfson Microelectronics (2006)

Wrote battery driver, improved Auxiliary ADC C++ code for Intel XScale on Windows CE. Wrote WM8711 Linux kernel driver in C which was released in 2.6.26. Improved AC’97, I2S audio drivers and fixed a noisy LCD issue.

Publications

Git in Practice (2014)

An opinionated intermediate/advanced Git book published with Manning Publications in September 2014.

Honours and Awards

New Years Honours Contribution to Open Source (2024)

OpenUK’s honours list celebrates the “Social Influencers of Open Source” in the UK.

JavaOne Rock Star (2014)

The JavaOne Rock Star Program recognises speakers for their outstanding session content and speaking ability.

Education

The University of Edinburgh (2003 - 2007)

BSc in Computer Science and Management Science (2:1)

Personal

References

More references available on request