2024.12.5

The month of 'What the Heck?! (2020)'

Franck Nijhof Franck Nijhof Comments

Welcome to the month of “What the heck?!”

Home Assistant is now almost around for 7 years! During that time, it has grown into a big project, beloved by many of you. However, as the project grew, some things might not have turned out the way it should be, are missing or maybe even started annoying you. That is what this month is about.

We realize reporting bugs on our GitHub might be a steep hill. You’ll need a GitHub account, report an issue following the issue templates using Markdown and the report itself needs to be written in a way a developer can work with it. Furthermore, we use our issue tracker for tracking actual issues and bugs; not small feature requests or annoyances.

While this is a common and reasonable process to collect, track and process bugs, our issue tracking process might not be the ideal way to learn about annoyances or small tweaks and improvements that can make us all enjoy Home Assistant even more.

In May, of this year, the Ruby on Rails project had a similar month, which we have enjoyed watching. Now, we are going to do something similar.

Today, we have opened up a Community Forum category as a safe, lower barrier place to tell about your Home Assistant “What the heck?!” moments, and more importantly, discuss and vote on topics your fellow users have brought up.

Frenck recently tried something similar for Home Assistant on Twitter, by asking:

The responses to that question were amazing! Full of inspiration, recognition of stuff that annoyed us as well, but also some really really good suggestions. And this is not just about new tiny little things, examples may include:

  • I’d love to see some Home Assistant sensors with things like: The total automations, triggers processed this hour, the total number of integrations, entities, number of events fired.
  • I want to be able to upload a backup on the frontend on the first install.
  • Maybe you are annoyed by some logs that you need to refresh and scroll to see updates?
  • You have a lot of template entities that all do the same thing and maybe could be handled by Home Assistant automatically.
  • Always need a workaround to automate something the way you like and really wished Home Assistant provided a better trigger/condition for it?

These are the things we are looking for, the things we should share this month.

We are really looking forward to all the stuff that will be brought up! This will be interesting!

Join us on the forums!

Image of a person expressing a what the heck moment So, when does Home Assistant trigger this moment for you?

FAQ

  • “I have multiple things! Should I put all my stuff in a single topic?!”

    No, please create multiple, smaller topics. Each topic can be voted on, picked up and resolved. Having multiple things stacked in a single forum topic, makes resolving, discussing and voting on them hard. There is no limitation on how many things one can suggest this month.

  • “Is everything reported going to be fixed/addressed?”

    There is no guarantee that will happen. The goal is to lower the barrier to reporting things for one month. Home Assistant still relies on contributors to address or improve the project. However, we do think collecting feedback this way can tremendously help with the upcoming Hacktoberfest.

  • “I really want this new integration to be implemented, so I can use my devices. Is this the right place for it?”

    No, this event is not for requesting new device or services integrations. Please use the “Feature Requests” forum category instead.

  • “I’ve found a bug and am comfortable with GitHub. Where should I report my issue now?”

    If you are comfortable with using GitHub, please, by all means, file an issue report on GitHub.