How nice of you to drop by and show an interest in my human existence 😊.
I’m Franck Nijhof, better known online as Frenck. I’m the Home Assistant Lead, a GitHub Star 🌟, and a full-time open sourcerer. That sounds like a collection of stickers on a laptop, and honestly, it kind of is.
Most of my work lives somewhere between smart homes, open source, GitHub, practical AI, and the messy reality of building things that people actually use. I care about technology that survives real life. Not the perfect demo. Not the marketing video. The version that still works when the family is tired, the Wi-Fi is being dramatic, and someone just wants the lights to turn on.
Home Assistant and the connected home
A big part of my life is Home Assistant. It is open source, privacy-focused, and built around the idea that your home should work for you, locally, without needing permission from a random cloud service on the other side of the planet.
I write about the connected home from that perspective. Sometimes that means Home Assistant features, automations, integrations, and hardware. Sometimes it means standards, privacy, product choices, or why a “smart” device is not very smart once the company behind it gets bored.
I like the honest version of smart homes. The one with weird edge cases, bad assumptions, sensors in the wrong place, automations that sounded brilliant at midnight, and the occasional “why did the hallway just turn into a disco?” moment. That is where the useful lessons live.
Open source, GitHub, and maintainer reality
I have been writing code for more than 30 years, and open source has been a constant thread through most of it. These days, that means working on Home Assistant, maintaining projects, reviewing contributions, thinking about releases, and spending a suspicious amount of time staring at GitHub notifications.
Open source is amazing. It is also work. Real work. It has users, expectations, security risks, community pressure, documentation debt, and the occasional issue that starts with “just a quick question” and somehow becomes a weekend.
So I write about that too. Not as a victory lap, but as field notes. What helps maintainers. What burns them out. What GitHub gets right. What it gets almost right. What contributors can do better. What project owners should probably stop pretending is fine.
Practical AI, without the circus
I also use AI. Not as magic. Not as a replacement for knowing what you are doing. More like another tool on the bench.
For me, the interesting part is not “AI can write code”. That conversation is already loud enough. The useful part is what AI can do around the work: filtering information, drafting reports, comparing options, summarizing noisy threads, helping with focus, preparing content, and turning a pile of raw input into something I can actually act on.
That is the AI lane I care about: practical workflows, real constraints, and honest failures. If it saves time but creates a maintenance mess, that is not a win. If it helps me think better, ship better, or spend more time on the human part of the work, now we are talking.
What you will find here
This site is my durable place on the internet. Social posts disappear into the algorithmic soup. This is where the longer version lives.
You can expect writing about:
- Home Assistant and smart-home reality 🏠
- open source maintainership and community work
- GitHub, releases, automation, and developer tooling
- practical AI workflows that are actually useful
- building my own smart home from scratch
- behind-the-scenes notes from events, content, and experiments
Sometimes it will be a tutorial. Sometimes an opinion. Sometimes a confession about something that did not work. Those are usually the best ones.
The human bit
I live in Enschede, in the east of the Netherlands. I’m a dad, a partner, a nerd, and someone who still believes that giving back to open source is one of the best things you can do with technical knowledge.
My motto is simple:
Make a positive difference every single day. Be the change.
That sounds bigger than most days feel. Some days the positive difference is a pull request. Some days it is a kind reply. Some days it is fixing one annoying thing so nobody else has to trip over it again.
That counts.
Hoping you enjoy the site. And if you want to reach out, feel free to contact me. Just please, not for Home Assistant support. I like sleep, at least in theory.
../Frenck