Mike McQuaid Avatar

Mike McQuaid

Homebrew project leader. CTO and Cofounder at Raise.dev. ex-GitHub. Rude people blocker. Wife, sons, dog and Apple things lover. Don’t mention/email/DM me about Homebrew issues, please!

Edinburgh, Scotland · Mastodon · Twitter · GitHub · LinkedIn · Website

Mike McQuaid brew.sh

Homebrew 3.0 ships with official Apple Silicon support

Mike McQuaid:

Thanks to all our hard-working maintainers, contributors, sponsors and supporters for getting us this far. Particular thanks on Homebrew 3.0.0 go to MacStadium and Apple for providing us with a lot of Apple Silicon hardware and Cassidy from Apple for helping us in many ways with this migration. Enjoy using Homebrew!

And a quick note on the Apple Silicon support:

Homebrew doesn’t (yet) provide bottles for all packages on Apple Silicon that we do on Intel x86_64 but we welcome your help in doing so.

I’d be surprised if this undertaking could be described as anything less than large. Congrats to Mike and the entire team! Homebrew is a gigantic blessing to developers (who use Macs) everywhere and a shining example of open source done well. 👏

Mike McQuaid mikemcquaid.com

Getting financial support from your users

Mike McQuaid shared some background on the approaches they’ve taken (and their pros and cons) to make Homebrew financially sustainable.

For predictable donations we set up the standard (at the time at least): a Patreon account. We offered nothing in exchange for donations but to told people we were an entirely volunteer-run project.

… We show users a one-time message on first install or on a Homebrew update to tell them we needed donations and where and how to do so. As soon as this message rolled out we saw a huge jump on donations eventually settling between $2500-$3000 a month on Patreon…

Mike McQuaid mikemcquaid.com

Stop mentoring first-time contributors

According to Mike McQuaid, the focus of an open source maintainer should be learning to mentor efficiently — where should you be investing your time?

If you’re an open source maintainer lucky enough to have a significant number of contributors you need to learn to mentor efficiently. First timer issues are not the right good way to get people involved in your project nor mentoring individual first-time contributors. Instead, do things that help all of them.

Mike McQuaid github.com

👢 Bootstrap your macOS development system

On this week’s Homebrew episode, we discussed Mike’s script that automates the setup of a new Mac.

Listen to the show for an in-depth discussion on why he built it, the value of automating tasks you don’t do often, and to hear how Adam rolls with new machines. Or forget all that and click the headline link to check out Strap for yourself.

Mike McQuaid mikemcquaid.com

"This is why people don’t contribute to your open source project"

Do you want more contributors and maintainers on your project? Mike McQuaid, maintainer of Homebrew (macOS package manager), writes on his personal blog:

Here are a a few guidelines in thinking about this:

  • Most contributors were users first (“scratching your own itch”: most people start contributing to an open source project to solve a problem they are experiencing)
  • Most maintainers were a contributor and user first (people don’t just jump into maintaining a project without helping to build it first)
  • Maintainers cannot do a good job without remaining a user (to maintain context, passion and empathy)

Combined, these start to look a bit like a sales funnel. People have to travel through each stage and there’s a fairly hefty drop-off at each one.

Also check out ~> Open source maintainers owe you nothing

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