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Joseph (JJ) Jacks for COSS Community

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OCS 2020 Breakout: Max Howell

Max Howell is the creator of Homebrew

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Max Howell talks with JJ about the beginnings of creating Homebrew, one of the most widely used and loved FOSS tools for Mac users.

You created one of the most widely used open-source projects called Homebrew. Tell us about your background and how the project came to be. - 0:13

I’m curious what the initial use cases were that caused you to create HomeBrew. Package management is obviously a big problem in just programming development in general. So initially how have you seen use cases evolve and has Homebrew evolved from your initial vision/in general? -15:06

It looks like the community has grown more than you initially imagined. If you were to guess the number of developers and users of Homebrew today, would that number be in the tens of millions or hundreds of millions? How many people do you think are using it? - 18:54

Brew is kind of like a verb at this point. Google it. Then you've got Brew at Sage, which is this package manager, kind of a discoverability engine, where you can type in which package might exist and there are analytics around that. Was that part of your vision as well initially to build kind of like a search marketplace for packages and being able to capture data and run analytics around that or was that something that evolved on its own? -21:05

I’m curious about the interest forming a company or business around HomeBrew. Did you ever imagine that that could be possible or have you seen other people attempt that? -24:31

How can people find out what you’re working on these days and what’s on the Horizon for Max Howell going forward? -26:25

Cool. Thanks so much for joining the conference this year. It’s really great having you. -27:33


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