I recently started using my personal MacBook Air for work. It’s a better piece of hardware then my company issued laptop and I prefer OS X over Windows everyday of the week. But since a lot of the software I use at work I don’t use at home I had to go through and install it all by hand. At least until I found Homebrew.

In the past I had use MacPorts as the way to get things like Python or Node.js installed. It just took forever to download and install mostly because it grabbed a lot of “dependency” packages that were not really needed. With this complaint in mind Homebrew was developed. It’s a much more modern package manager written on Ruby. And the best part, in my opinion, is that the entire install and packages are self contained and easily un-installable if needed. This is something that really bugged me about MacPorts and so I can say I am a happy Ports->Homebrew convert.