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I need to be honest with you.
A lot of you keep asking when I'm going back to streaming. I see the comments. I see the Discord messages. "When's the next stream, Frenck?", "Miss the live coding sessions!", "Time to stream homie!"
And look, I get it. I miss it too. 😢
But it's not coming back. At least not anytime soon. Could it return someday in some form? Maybe. But not in the way it was, and definitely not right now.
And I think that's actually okay. Let me explain.
What happened to streaming
I used to stream regularly. Live coding and building Home Assistant integrations and add-ons, debugging weird issues, tinkering with my own smart home, just hanging out with the community, and talking through problems in real-time.
I loved it. 🥰
The direct connection. The spontaneity. The ability to show the messy, real process of building software; not the polished, edited version. Being able to answer your questions immediately and riff on ideas together.
But here's the reality I had to face: I'm the Lead of Home Assistant. I'm helping build the Open Home Foundation. I have a family, 2 kids! And streaming consistently requires 6-9 hours a week of scheduled, focused time when I have to be "on". Like really hyped and ON.
Honestly, I was heading straight for burnout. 🥵
Something had to give. And for a while, I just... stopped. Figured I'd come back to it when things calmed down. Except things don't calm down when you're building the world's biggest open source smart home platform. They get busier.
So I had a choice: Keep feeling guilty about not streaming, or admit it wasn't working and find a better way.
The thing I actually loved
Here's what I realized: What I actually loved about streaming wasn't the "being live for 3-4 hours" part.
It was showing you the real stuff. Taking you behind the scenes. Explaining why things work the way they do, from my perspective. Teaching without all the polish and marketing BS.
And here's the thing: I don't need to be live to do that.
What if I could take you WITH me instead of making you and me show up at a scheduled time? What if you could see what I see when I'm at GitHub Universe, or at CES 2026 in January, or building out a smart home at my new place?
What if I could show you the behind-the-scenes of Home Assistant decisions, the architecture choices, the controversial stuff, the "why the hell did they do it that way" moments? But do it on my schedule and yours, and with MY perspective on them?
That's when I realized: I don't need to stream. I need to vlog. 🤳
Enter: The DJI Osmo Pocket 3
I got this little camera. You'll see it a lot. It's small enough that I can record anywhere, anytime, without a big production setup.
Walking through a conference explaining what I'm seeing? Done.
Sitting in my car sharing my thoughts on a controversial decision? Easy.
Building out a room in my new house and explaining MY integration choices? Or even better, showing my failures? Perfect.
It's the spontaneity I loved about streaming, but without requiring you and me to be there at exactly 8 PM on a Tuesday and Friday.
What's actually coming
So here's what I'm doing:
Vlogs. Raw, unscripted, taking you places. GitHub Universe: I'm taking you with me to share what I see. CES 2026 in January? You're coming. A Home Assistant community meetup? You'll be there. My perspective on all of it.
The smart home build. I'm moving to a new house in December, and it's got ridiculous smart home potential. I'm documenting the build from day one. Device choices I make. Integrations I set up. Of course, every time something breaks spectacularly (and it will). You're seeing all of it.
Behind the scenes of Home Assistant. What it's actually like making decisions that affect millions of users, at least from where I sit. The debates. The trade-offs. The 2am realizations. The mistakes. Not the sanitized PR version, my version. My perspective as someone deeply involved.
But here's the thing I'm most excited about...
Ask Frenck: Unfiltered
I'm launching a series. Every episode, I'm taking ONE question, a meaty, interesting, maybe controversial question, and I'm giving you 10-15 minutes of MY brutally honest answer.
This is NOT rapid-fire Q&A where I answer 20 surface-level questions, like question about my taste of music...?! 🕺
I'm talking about questions like:
- "Why doesn't Home Assistant have RBAC support yet?"
- "What's the actual difference between add-ons and integrations, and why is it so confusing?"
- "Why did Home Assistant deprecate older 32-bits architectures? Doesn't that collide with the sustainability values of the Open Home Foundation?"
- "Why do backward-incompatible (also known as breaking changes) keep happening?"
- "Is Home Assistant too complicated for beginners and becoming too limited for the advanced users?"
The hard questions. The ones that deserve real explanation. The ones you've been arguing about on Reddit at 2am. 😬
I'm going to pick one every episode and explain it. Completely. Honestly. No marketing speak. No corporate BS. No beating around the bush.
Why? Because I'm the one making a lot of these decisions, or at least deeply involved in them. And I think you deserve to know WHY things are the way they are. The constraints we work under. The trade-offs we make. The things we tried that failed.
The real version.
Why this matters
Look, there are a lot of Home Assistant YouTube channels. Most of them do tutorials. "Here's how to set up X" or "Here's my automation for Y", and that's great, we need those.
But I'm not trying to be another tutorial channel.
I can show you the WHY behind the decisions. I can explain the architecture. I can be honest about the mistakes. I can give you the insider perspective that only someone in my position can give.
And I think that's actually more valuable than another "How to install HACS!" video. I rather dive into the "Why do we even need install HACS ourselves and why isn't this just built-in into Home Assistant in the first place?".
What I need from you
Drop your questions. In the comments on this post, on the YouTube video, on X/Twitter, on Mastodon, on Bluesky, on Instagram, wherever.
Ask me the hard questions. The technical ones. The controversial ones. The ones that matter.
- Why doesn't Home Assistant do [thing you wish it did]?
- How would you approach [the thing you'd like to automate]?
- Why did we decide [decision that frustrated you]?
- What's really happening with [topic everyone's confused about]?
- What's your opinion on [controversial thing]?
Simple questions are fine too. But I'm hunting for the meaty ones. The ones that deserve some time of real explanation. The ones that make you go "I've always wondered about that."
Summing it all up
Streaming isn't coming back. Not right now, not in the near future. Could it return someday in some different form? Maybe. But that's not what I'm focused on.
What's coming instead is me taking you with me. On the journey. Behind the scenes. Into the decisions. With all the honesty and mess and authenticity that I loved about streaming, but in a way that's actually sustainable.
First episode of the "Ask Frenck: Unfiltered" I will drop soon. I'm heading out for GitHub Universe the end of October, and around Christmas, I hope to start my brand new smart home journey in my new house.
If any of that sounds interesting, stick around. Subscribe on YouTube if you haven't. Sign up for the newsletter if you want the behind-the-scenes stuff in your inbox.
And most importantly: Ask me the hard questions.
Let's do this.
Choo Choo! 🚂
../Frenck
