👋 I'm Franck Nijhof.
Home Assistant lead 🏠, GitHub Star 🌟, full-time open sourcerer 🪄

Starting with Home Assistant 2026.11, HACS is built into Home Assistant and called the Marketplace. Everything migrates automatically, nothing costs money, and if it feels like nothing changed, it was done right.

The new triggers and conditions make Home Assistant automations more approachable, more powerful, and easier to extend without taking away the power underneath.

Open source became critical infrastructure. That success changed what pull request review means, especially for projects like Home Assistant that millions of households now depend on.

Home Assistant automation modes decide what happens when an automation is triggered again while it is still running. Here is when to use single, restart, queued, or parallel.

A smart home is not magic sustainability dust. The useful part is measurement, local control, and keeping good devices useful longer.

AI did not create the maintainer burden problem in open source. It accelerated it. Contributors are being amplified, but maintainers are still the verification bottleneck.

Developer tooling is part of supply chain security now. Editors, extensions, CLIs, language servers, and AI tools live next to the credentials maintainers use to publish software.

It started with a DOOM t-shirt at a meetup. The real question? Can Home Assistant run DOOM? Two hours later, I had a fully working DOOM integration for Home Assistant and was fighting demons on my smart home dashboard.

We got the keys 48 hours ago. The house is full of boxes, chaos, and smart home equipment I don't know how to control yet. This is the real journey of building a Home Assistant smart home from scratch. No polish, just authentic discovery and inevitable failures.