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Mike McQuaid @mikemcquaid.com · 7d

If you liked this: reply here or email one of us with what we should talk about next and we'll do more.

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Mike McQuaid @mikemcquaid.com · 7d

Get context from the post that sparked this conversation in mikemcquaid.com/minimum-viab...

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Mike McQuaid @mikemcquaid.com · 7d

Had a chat yesterday with my best ever manager, Neha Batra, on minimum viable engineering management, one-on-ones, feedback and better product vs. engineering fights.

Check it out on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZSe...

Building Trust and Having Better Fights with Neha Batra and Mike McQuaid

YouTube video by Mike McQuaid

www.youtube.com

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Mike McQuaid @mikemcquaid.com · 9d

Yes, it is. Paul is Irish. I am Scottish. It is common in both our countries’ cultures.

I have been involved with trying to prevent, mediate and now repair such events. One can both take things seriously and use humour. If you don’t wish to: that’s up to you.

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Mike McQuaid @mikemcquaid.com · 9d

It was a joke about Game of Thrones. Can we turn down the heat a little please? It’s not helping anyone.

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Reposted by Mike McQuaid

404 Media @404media.co · 10d

New: the world of Ruby has gone completely off the rails over the past few weeks. Developers suddenly locked out, corporate pressure, and claims of a "hostile takeover" of one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure for the internet we all rely on everyday
www.404media.co/how-ruby-wen...

How Ruby Went Off the Rails

What happened to RubyGems, Bundler, and the Open Source drama that controls the internet infrastructure.

www.404media.co

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Reposted by Mike McQuaid

Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 12d

Proposal: move RubyGems (the gem and bundler CLI tools) to the same Ruby org that governs the language itself.

It's an accident of history that Ruby, its dependency tools, and its dependency hosting are managed by three separate entities. (And it hasn't gone great.)

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Mike McQuaid @mikemcquaid.com · 13d

Have thought a bit at past few companies about whether engineering management in some form is always necessary (spoilers: yes) and what's the minimal viable level of engineering management:
mikemcquaid.com/minimum-viab...

When I joined GitHub there was none. This sounded great but was actually bad.

Minimum Viable Engineering Management

When I first joined GitHub in 2013, there was no engineering management. They had people in engineering leadership roles (some with titles, some without) but no dedicated managers to check in with reg...

mikemcquaid.com

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Mike McQuaid @mikemcquaid.com · 13d

More Of This Sort Of Thing. Pointing and laughing is much more effective than people think.

tef @tef.bsky.social · 19d

in case you're not sure who dhh is, he's a danish counterstrike player and race car owner who writes essays like "i am smarter than you" and "foreigners bad"

rich enough not to worry about consequences but at the very same time, still desperate for status, a man two friends short of a podcast

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Mike McQuaid @mikemcquaid.com · 14d

I think we've used OpaVote the last few years.

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Mike McQuaid @mikemcquaid.com · 14d

Problem is: there's also people who weren't removed who were entirely inactive.

Mike McQuaid @mikemcquaid.com · 14d

We'd love to have you! Feel free to email me and I'll share my iMessage/WhatsApp/whatever and help you get started :)

Mike McQuaid @mikemcquaid.com · 14d

Thanks for the kind words Martin, always a pleasure dealing with you. I had sent this data privately to enough people that it felt like it made sense to just make it public and let people draw their own conclusions.

Mike McQuaid @mikemcquaid.com · 15d

Lots of RubyGems chat recently, very little data. I've used Homebrew's tooling to analyse RubyGems public GitHub data and posted it here: mikemcquaid.com/rubygems-con...

RubyGems Contribution Data with Homebrew’s Tooling

There’s ongoing discussion about recent changes to access in the RubyGems GitHub organisation. If you need context, first read Open Source Turmoil: RubyGems Maintainers Kicked Off GitHub. My goal is t...

mikemcquaid.com

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Mike McQuaid @mikemcquaid.com · 15d

Sorry not sorry people who want to make this one-dimensional: that includes Ruby / Rails maintainers at Shopify.

Please let's not turn OSS into an environment where we assume malice based on your present or past employers.

This happened on Homebrew while at GitHub, was 100% untrue and felt awful.

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Mike McQuaid @mikemcquaid.com · 15d

> For the entire time, I have remained independent of any company in my decisions and actions. Even while working full-time jobs elsewhere, I made sure my contributions reflected the voice of the community rather than the goals of any corporation.

This is great 👏 and the case for most maintainers.

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Mike McQuaid @mikemcquaid.com · 15d

Another day in Rubyland, another first-hand account from a departing RubyGems maintainer: gist.github.com/simi/349d881...

rc-wtf.md

GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

gist.github.com

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Reposted by Mike McQuaid

Martin Emde @martinemde.com · 15d

Joel did an amazing amount of investigative work to put together the most accurate representation of this situation that I’m aware of. I stand by everything that I’m able to vouch for. I don’t have anything else to add. Thank you for your effort here @joel.drapper.me

Joel Drapper 🇬🇧🇺🇦 @joel.drapper.me · 15d

After listening to about a dozen first-hand accounts, I’ve published what I know about the RubyGems takeover.

Shopify, pulling strings at Ruby Central, forces Bundler and RubyGems takeover

Ruby Central recently took over a collection of open source projects from their maintainers without their consent.

joel.drapper.me

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Reposted by Mike McQuaid

Joel Drapper 🇬🇧🇺🇦 @joel.drapper.me · 15d

After listening to about a dozen first-hand accounts, I’ve published what I know about the RubyGems takeover.

Shopify, pulling strings at Ruby Central, forces Bundler and RubyGems takeover

Ruby Central recently took over a collection of open source projects from their maintainers without their consent.

joel.drapper.me

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Mike McQuaid @mikemcquaid.com · 16d

The point of the post is that others intentions are not reliably knowable and others are affected by actions not intentions.

In this specific case: I have seen a lot more bad actions than I have publicly stated and am keeping them private to avoid unnecessarily hostility being directed at folks.

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Mike McQuaid @mikemcquaid.com · 17d

Finally: for anyone going "who are you and what do you know about anything?". Hi, I'm Mike. I've been a Homebrew (brew.sh) maintainer for 16 years. I was the first person to raise any money for Homebrew and have led all our financial/governance efforts. I'm (repeatedly) elected as Project Leader 👋

brew.shmaintainer

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Mike McQuaid @mikemcquaid.com · 17d

You may have noticed I have deliberately not named anyone at RubyCentral. This is deliberate. An organisation did this and an organisation needs held accountable. Individuals within that organisation have their own motivations, intentions, bills to pay, experience and relationships.

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Mike McQuaid @mikemcquaid.com · 17d

There's been a lot of talk about "good intentions". In my opinion, they don't matter (mikemcquaid.com/our-intentio...).

What matters are actions, not intentions. Give me great actions with terrible intentions over the opposite every time.

Our Intentions Don’t Matter

This is a bit of a departure from my usual writing but it’s a topic that’s been on my mind for years. What finally pushed me over the edge was reading Michael Lewis’ “Going Infinite”; his telling of t...

mikemcquaid.com

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Mike McQuaid @mikemcquaid.com · 17d

Homebrew uses OpenCollective. It's great. You can see all money coming in/going out of Homebrew: opencollective.com/homebrew?hos...

Even 10% of this level of transparency on RubyGems would answer a lot of questions (and raise a lot more relevant ones).

Homebrew - Open Collective

Homebrew is the missing package manager for macOS (or Linux) and a non-profit project run entirely by volunteers.

opencollective.com

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Mike McQuaid @mikemcquaid.com · 17d

I know GitHub access permissions are confusing but I can't really see a reason to go from "Owner" to "No Write Access on any repository" for most of these folks.

I'm not going to share the data myself but: it's fairly easy to query public GitHub activity and see some very unusual removals.

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