Motivating Volunteers with Soft Power and Clear Boundaries

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. From early GitHub workflows to today’s automation and guardrails, Mike details the soft-power leadership that keeps volunteers motivated, and shares insights on how to scale contributions, keep a small maintainer team effective, and triage with empathy (and boundaries). This episode covers governance, “saying no,” using AI responsibly, and how IRL feedback at Universe turned into performance wins.

Links mentioned in the episode:

https://brew.sh

https://www.macports.org

https://fosdem.org

https://githubuniverse.com

https://mikemcquaid.com

https://github.com/TheoPFR/somo

github.com/github/spec-kit

https://flukeout.github.io/

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