Meet the Crew: Jared Mariash, Product Engineer

I first met Jared about a year ago, and couldn’t wait to work together. His enthusiasm is infectious, and I couldn’t believe that he had built Updatest in his spare time outside his customer-facing sales role. 

Since then I’ve gotten to know Jared – and his two Pomeranians, his former life as a club promoter, and his Apple fandom – as he and his company both joined Workbrew to bring the desktop application experience to teams and enterprises. 

Fresh off the Workbrew 2.0 launch, I sat down with him to talk about what just shipped, why he joined, and where we're headed next.

The Workbrew app is officially here! I know your efforts were instrumental, so let’s talk about what shipped, and how you thought about the customer experience.#

We shipped the Workbrew desktop app, which gives our customers a much more user-friendly way into Workbrew. Developers are used to the terminal and the CLI, but your average HR representative, or anyone else in the company who needs access to these tools, may not know how a terminal works. Now there's a beautiful interface where people can request and install software, manage allowlists for casks, and update their casks and fonts all in one go.

Alongside that, we shipped Updatest 3.0, which is now free for everybody, and folks who bought it back when it was a paid application get access to the Updatest Network, which launched at the same time.

The Updatest Network adds source coverage. It isn't meant to replace Updatest's existing local sources; it's a supplement for people with lots of apps from niche third-party developers who don't expose update information in a way a traditional updater can see. Now you have visibility into those too. 

When you heard about Workbrew, what made you interested in collaborating? What signals did you see that this was a fit?#

Updatest went from a tiny side project, where I just wanted to solve one little problem for myself and hoped people liked it, to a real business out of nowhere. When John first reached out, I dug into what Workbrew does, what the company's core mission is, and what problems it's trying to solve. It all lined up with what I was already doing.

I'd never approached the enterprise market. My focus was always the individual consumer: mom, pop, grandpa, son, daughter. But even before Workbrew got in touch, I was getting tons of emails asking how to get Updatest into a company. “Can I use this at work? What are the security implications? Does it do this, this and this in a corporate environment?”

In my previous role I worked with corporate and enterprise customers every day, so I'd kept a separation: serving enterprises was “work” and the individual side was “fun.” Once I saw I could do both at the same time, serving enterprise customers while Updatest kept supporting households and individuals, it was kind of kismet.

I'm one guy in a chair with a keyboard. Workbrew is a company with a bunch of smart folks who could help me navigate all of this, so we could make the product successful on the Updatest side and apply what Updatest had learned to Workbrew. After meeting you, meeting John and learning the company's goals, there was almost no other option.

Something that’s unique about you is you’ve been in sales, but at Workbrew you’re a Product Engineer. How did you think about translating Updatest’s feature to the enterprise?#

I stumbled into sales and discovered I was good at talking to people, but rarely got to sit down and build something. So I started coding in the limited off-hours I had, and that's where Updatest came from: wanting to do both things in a 24-hour window where half of it you have to sleep.

When I got here, I looked at capabilities: What do Workbrew do today? What could we do in the future? What does Updatest already do that Workbrew doesn't? Once I had those lists and had talked with everyone about the roadmap, I could see where Updatest shines and where Workbrew hadn't looked yet, or had only just started looking.

From there, I put together a list of where to aim an initial launch to give customers the most value. We focused on casks and fonts, and worked out how to make them mesh. Updatest needed to stay its own thing and keep meeting its users' needs. On the Workbrew side, everything we brought over had to meet the security expectations of an enterprise. Then it was about merging it all together and getting it working.

You've worked remotely for years. What has surprised you about Workbrew's fully remote team?#

The most surprising thing was how unsurprising it was. Everything here feels normal. I've worked remotely for over seven years, and back in sales I had to be face-to-face with people every day. 

If you want the best people for the role, you can't scope yourself to your local area. There are so many smart people out there, and so many at Workbrew. I learn something new every day. I get to watch two smart people hash out a super complex problem and reach a resolution, whatever their starting opinions were.

In a local office-based company, people often share similar upbringings and similar opinions. Bring together folks from the Philippines, UK, Iceland,  and from North America, and you get ideas from every angle. You'd think different hours and time zones would cause a mess, but people work together really well.

You and I have worked closely for nine months, through an acquisition and a major launch, and we've never met in person. There's an ongoing joke that I might be a robot. I think it says something about how aligned we were from the start, and that the system works.

What are you excited about next?#

I'm excited to see how far we can go by combining Updatest's knowledge base with Workbrew's enterprise customers. The goal is coverage for every piece of software on the Mac, regardless of where it comes from. That was the problem Updatest solved: there are hundreds of places to get software, and Updatest knows where those pieces come from.

I'm proud of the level of care this team brings to understanding the macOS landscape, both before I joined and now that I'm part of it. While building Updatest and taking feedback from tens of thousands of users, sometimes at 11 AM and sometimes at 3 AM, I noticed almost nobody focused on the source: where software actually comes from. macOS is very fragmented, because developers can ship software however they like.

Windows and Linux have the same problem. No operating system today has one central repository where everything comes from and everything can be managed. I'd already been asking myself what Updatest looks like on Windows, or whether it could manage Homebrew installations on Linux. When I joined and heard everyone having the same deep conversations that were already in my head, it was a light bulb moment: I'd finally found a group of people with the same goal.

Workbrew is looking towards Windows next, and we're hiring for it. If you want to help us build it, check out our open roles.