Franck Nijhof

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.

I'm moving to a new place mid-December, and I can't sleep. Not from stress, but from the overwhelming excitement of building a smart home from scratch. Where do I even start? My brain won't shut up about all the possibilities.

New Home Assistant users constantly hit the same confusion: add-ons or integrations? Both sound like things you add, but serve different purposes. I just proposed renaming add-ons to apps. It's more than terminology, it's about clarity for millions of users.

My streams aren't coming back. But what's coming instead might be better: vlogs from GitHub Universe and CES 2026, a complete smart home build documentary, and "Ask Frenck: Unfiltered", where I answer the hard questions about Home Assistant with brutal honesty. My channel. My views. No BS.

After 4 years of waiting, GitHub finally added YAML anchors to GitHub Actions. Then I read the docs: no merge keys. They shipped half the feature, gained all the complexity costs, and missed the entire point. Here's what actually works and why I'm disappointed.

People assume my smart home is a futuristic, perfectly automated masterpiece. The reality? Let’s just say… it’s time for some confessions. 😰

I've visited the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) at the beginning of 2025. I spent many hours exploring the "smart home" areas of the expo, and this is what I've noticed and learned about the future of the connected smart home.

A home battery that you can install yourself. No electrician, no complicated setup—just plug it in, and it works (allegedly).