Max Howell (@mxcl) / X

Max Howell

4,395 posts

Max Howell

@mxcl

Creator of Homebrew. You’re welcome and I apologize. Now building the security layer for what happens when AI agents use it: @AutomicVault

Apex, NC, USA

Joined April 2007

Pinned
Max Howell
@mxcl
Jun 2
Developers have become the new secrets vault. The biggest supply chain attacks of 2026 didn't start by attacking production. They started by attacking developer laptops. - TanStack - Nx Console - Bitwarden CLI - LiteLLM - durabletask The malware all looked for the same things:
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Max Howell
@mxcl
Jun 10, 2015
Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so fuck off.
Max Howell
@mxcl
Dec 15, 2024
Updateware: software that is always updating itself but nothing ever changes: bugs don’t get fixed and the UI is forever stuck in the past. Examples: Spotify, Steam, Discord
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Max Howell
@mxcl
Jul 11, 2020
Facebook is another company where you have to do obscure computer science puzzles to get a job there, but once there feel free to write code that crashes 20% of the apps on the App Store. Quality is unimportant provided you can feel smug about how to manipulate data structures.
Max Howell
@mxcl
Jan 23, 2024
Web2 was built on Open Source. I created Homebrew, used by almost every web2 company… yet the most compensation I ever received was a (literal) “thank you for Homebrew” blanket from Google one cold winter. PromiseKit, another project I created, was once used by over 100,000
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Max Howell
@mxcl
Feb 9, 2019
Users don’t care if your app is cross platform, they only care about one platform: *their* platform. Is your app bad on their platform because it’s not good on *any* platform because it’s written in a cross platform toolkit? Good luck then.
Max Howell
@mxcl
Jul 2, 2019
Apple engineer: how often should we invalidate sessions at developer.apple.com? Tim Cook: Developers grow through pain. They should have to sign in multiple times a day and make sure the login form needlessly separates username and password entry with gratuitous animations.
Apple Developer
From developer.apple.com
Max Howell
@mxcl
Mar 19, 2024
In 2021 I was once again between paid work and wanting to work on Open Source fulltime. I looked at what was there and decided it couldn’t realize my dream. One evening I realized that I could wait forever for some one else to make my dream true—or I could fix it myself. So I
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Max Howell
@mxcl
Nov 16, 2023
Replying to @thdxr
Homebrew was good at the time, but I agree it's stale nowadays (I pushed it out in like 2009) so I built a new one
GitHub - pkgxdev/pkgx: Run Anything
From github.com
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Max Howell
@mxcl
Jan 12, 2019
I made a new thing, Swift-scripting with dependencies, no additional files, just your script: github.com/mxcl/swift-sh
Max Howell
@mxcl
Dec 16, 2024
Replying to @chernobyl_spa
sanctimonyware
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Max Howell
@mxcl
Nov 6, 2018
Server-side Swift is terrific. Here’s part one of six on the making of Canopy. This week focusing on why Swift was so good for writing server-side code:
Server-side Swift: Making Canopy
From medium.com
Max Howell
@mxcl
Nov 20, 2024
Replying to @venturetwins
I was excited until I saw it's in French. Now I am waiting for someone to do this in English and get all the glory while these French people take their irritation at being first but nobody caring to their graves.
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Max Howell
@mxcl
May 20, 2024
15 years ago, I made the first commit to Homebrew, never imagining it would become one of the most widely used Open Source projects of all time. I dedicated myself full-time, unpaid (and often underappreciated), to brew. I don’t think it would exist if I hadn’t. I lived on
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