Mike McQuaid's Podcasts

Podcast: 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.

Podcast: Software Engineering Daily

Mike McQuaid discusses Homebrew’s evolution, open source maintenance on macOS, and practical package management tradeoffs.

Podcast: Breaking Change - Hotfix podcast

Also available in swear-free/bleeped version on The Changelog and Friends podcast

Podcast: Minimum Viable Management

In this episode of Minimum Viable Management, Mike McQuaid and Neha Batra dive deep into the messy art of decision-making. When should you seek input and build consensus and when should you just make the call? They swap stories about frameworks for faster, clearer decisions, how to handle reversibility (“one-way vs two-way doors”), and how to communicate so people understand not just what you decided, but why.

They also discuss how leaders can empower others to show leadership at any level, the real cost of over-meeting, and what it means to take ownership when things go wrong.

Podcast: Minimum Viable Management

In the first episode of Minimum Viable Management, Mike McQuaid and Neha Batra reunite to talk about what “minimum viable management” really means: how to lead effectively without drowning in meetings or bureaucracy. They cover one-on-ones that actually work, giving and receiving feedback, establishing connections, servant leadership without martyrdom, and what good arguments look like between managers, engineers, and product.

Podcast: GitHub Podcast

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.

Podcast: Ruby Rogues

In this episode of Ruby Rogues, I sit down with Mike McQuaid, lead maintainer of Homebrew, to talk all about building and distributing CLIs. We dig into the practical steps for turning small scripts into reliable command-line tools, why Ruby is a great starting point, and when you might want to reach for Go or Rust instead.

Podcast: Open Source Ready Podcast

In episode 14 of Open Source Ready, special guests Mike McQuaid and John Britton join Brian and John to share the story of Workbrew.

Podcast: Mac Admins Podcast

The team at Workbrew has been focused on getting into full production, and they’ve gotten a huge head of steam going in 2024. They’re with us today to talk about SBOMs.

Podcast: Scaling DevTools

Mike McQuaid and John Britton are cofounders of Workbrew - a tool that gives you the missing features for enterprises running Homebrew.