There will be bleeps

October 17, 2025·1 hr 42 min·5 clips

Homebrew's 16-year maintainer Mike McQuaid says open source is not a career — and younger maintainers are being lied to.

Code review is the first hinge. The opener puts CodeRabbit's CLI Reviews against a plain developer headache: more code is getting made, attention is thinner, and review is still where the line bunches up. From there, the conversation turns into a lived open source story. A paid job creates daily friction, and a side project becomes the fastest way to make it stop. Back around 2010, the example is a pseudo HTML and JavaScript setup inside a Java runtime, with a Maven plugin that could run in CI. It sounds a little ridiculous, in the good developer way. It also sounds exactly like something built on a weekend or late at night because arguing for budget would take longer than proving the thing works. The move is simple. Publish the tool, use it at work, and if it helps the person paying you, the project suddenly has a real dependent. That changes the ask. Instead of asking for time before anyone understands the thing, the speaker describes earning time once the improvement is already visible. Permission comes later. Forgiveness may do the job too. The open source story here is not grand theory. It is closer to a survival tactic for making the job less annoying. The plugin matters less than the working model: build the useful thing, share it publicly because that is simpler than an internal artifact, then let feedback and workplace use decide whether it deserves more hours. The ending stays scruffy. Compliments, weekend signoff energy, words better left unsaid, and a mutually assured content joke all pile into an outro that refuses to land cleanly. That fits the episode: ship the thing, keep the human edges, and let the tape run a bit long.

As heard by us

A developer-minded crossover on code review pressure and the workplace incentives that push useful tools into open source.

There will be bleeps is a loose Changelog & Friends crossover about the pressure piling onto software teams as code volume rises, AI-generated work enters the mix, and review becomes the choke point. The stronger thread is more personal: open source as a practical workaround.

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Why you'd press play

You want a fresh angle on why code review, not coding, can be the real bottleneck.

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