Homebrew is one of the few open source products that is really marketed well. I don't use it, but the brand recognition it has created for itself is really commendable, and something that most opensource developers should learn from.
In any forum (SE, Reddit, HN etc.) whenever someone mentions the need to install a package the HB developers / product manager(s) create a post suggesting Homebrew along with the command on how to use it. They rightly targeted newbie programmers. Good marketing is indistinguishable from word of mouth marketing. In fact, once marketing achieves a critical level of user-base, good marketers shift to create strategies to promote "word of mouth" because of how effective a genuine referral from an existing customer.
LOL! He did talk a lot about his programming backstory (played with BASIC as a kid, no formal training, chemistry major, discovering Linux) and how this informed his worldview. Bottom-line, he is very results-driven and I think he has a good point about how a lot of tech interviews screen too much for theory and not practice. Turns out you don't need to know how to invert a binary tree to build the most successful package manager of all time :)
