Meet the Crew: Adam Selby, Enablement Engineer

Adam spent over a decade in IT admin roles (first at the University of North Texas, then at Capital One) before joining Workbrew as an Enablement Engineer in July. Only a month in, he’s hit the ground running with the NYC Jamf Meetup, MacDevOps in Montreal, and MacAdmins PSU. I sat down with him to talk about why he made the jump from Fortune 100 to startup, what surprised him the most, and what he's excited about next.

Your career has been an IT admin roles at universities and then banking. What made you want to join Workbrew?

I first learned about Workbrew a couple of years ago, at MacAdmins PSU, so I got to see it from the outside first. 

I was interested in the product, but also the people. There was this sense of what's possible in this space with a really smart team behind it. That combination made me feel like there was something here worth giving a shot.

It's maybe not an obvious move after ten years in education and then a bank. Going from a Fortune 100 company, let alone a bank, to a startup isn't a path a lot of people take. 

But from the outside, Workbrew seemed too interesting to pass up, and well-positioned to do genuinely new things in the MacAdmin space.

From the minute you heard about Workbrew, what did you recognize about the problem it was solving, and how did that resonate with your own experience?

Workbrew addresses the kind of problem that's so common it seems like there shouldn't be an obvious solution. 

And for a while there wasn't one — people were doing this on their own, trying to make things work without being able to invest the time to do it properly. 

I saw that firsthand at Capital One, where the number of people using Homebrew roughly doubled in a single year. This was even before "everybody needs AI tools to be a builder" — this was just developers adopting Homebrew and their teams pushing them to distribute software internally with it.

So there was already a lot of momentum. Once I saw the full picture, the pieces of Workbrew felt obvious — which isn't that common in enterprise tools. Usually there isn't a clear, intuitive "oh, I get this immediately" moment. Workbrew had that.

Your role is Enablement Engineer. What has that consisted of in your first month?

So far, it's meant being present in the community — in the Mac Admins Slack, and at conferences like MacDevOps and MacAdmins at Penn State, with JNUC coming up later this year. 

Part of it is being the voice in the room from the MacAdmin space with our product and sales teams, helping close gaps where a lot of people are coming at this from a developer background. Many of the team members here were Homebrew fans first.

Everyone at Workbrew already has a strong understanding of the MacAdminspace, especially having been part of that community for the last couple of years. I can contribute that admin-side perspective, making sure we're doing right by admins, developers, and security teams alike.

The easiest way I've found to describe the role is: a mix of sales engineering and support engineering, with some old-school Apple evangelism blended in. The goal is making sure people who want to use Workbrew can actually do the things they want to do, and that we keep shipping features that benefit them.

In your first month, you've already been on the road at two conferences with a third planned, plus getting up to speed on a lot of new tools. What has surprised you about Workbrew from the inside — being a member of the crew?

I already knew everyone was really nice — I had a good impression from the outside. But everyone here seems to be operating at the very top of their game. It's a company full of genuinely smart people, each doing their specific thing, while still taking input from pretty much everybody. There isn't really an area where I, or anyone else, can't jump in and share context or an opinion. I like that a lot more than being siloed off, which is how large organizations tend to feel.

I have to imagine Workbrew has a different “stack” of tools than you’re used to. How did you get up to speed in a global, remote organization?

There's definitely an adjustment to defaulting to async, first posting on GitHub instead of firing off a Slack message. GitHub keeps a record of all our projects, long-term. I can go look at a conversation from a year and a half ago and get the same context anyone would have had at the time.

What are you most excited about in the next six months?

Part of why I joined, and something we announced not long after I started at MacAdmins Penn State, is the Workbrew App (now in Early Access). The idea of using Homebrew as the backbone of patch management across a fleet is so obvious to me, and it made me feel confident this was the right direction and that everyone here understands it's the right path.

What's most interesting is that because the Homebrew catalog is so large, this is a patch management solution that can actually cover everything. Plus, it's extensible in a way that already feels familiar to Mac admins. There's a lot of exciting territory there.

Now that you're on the inside building products for IT admins, has your understanding of the role or its challenges changed at all?

I think there are things we as MacAdmins can lose sight of, like how we may enjoy  building and owning infrastructure, that's not something everyone has the bandwidth to do. 

We hold a lot of context in our heads: we’re oversubscribed, so you build shortcuts for yourself — but only you know how they work, which can make it hard for your own replacement, because people will move on.

It's made me think more like a systems thinker: is this the right call, even if it's technically cool, if it's going to be a lot of upkeep later? Being aware of how those decisions affect the organization's resilience overall.

Check out Adam’s recent posts “WWDC: The MacAdmin Checklist”), https://workbrew.com/blog/macdevops-2026 or find him @AdamSelby on the MacAdmins Slack.