I’ve said it before, but Home Assistant would be nothing without its community. That’s why we decided this year to focus our anniversary celebration on acknowledging and thanking our amazing community. It’s fitting as 2024 was the year we added a dedicated community manager, Missy Quarry, who hosted this celebration of you in our 11th Anniversary live stream.
Missy co-hosted the stream with creator and Home Assistant community member Andrej Broz, better known as Bearded Tinker. Together they threw a barrage of questions at Frenck and myself – we didn’t see any of them ahead of time so our responses don’t get any more real than that. It was a lot of fun, and there was even a little announcement slipped in there, so please check it out.
We can’t thank our community enough for the past 11 years. You are the engine driving forward Home Assistant. You put in your spare time to test, fix, build, and share your ideas. You fund our work by subscribing to Home Assistant Cloud, which allows us to devote our full attention to you, and never have to answer to a bunch of investors. We couldn’t do it without you.
Live stream
We went over a lot in this live stream, so here are some highlights to help you,
(0:00) Compilation of thanks from our code owners
(0:02) Intro from Missy and Bearded Tinker
(0:05) What does community mean to you?
(0:13) Beta testing and how stable is a dot zero release?
(0:18) Keeping the community on course
(0:22) The Evolution of the Community
(0:31) Moving to date versioning
(0:37) Customizability of Home Assistant and HACS
(0:47) Changing names of things in Home Assistant
(0:55) How we began to focus more on UX and UI
(1:03) Moving the focus away from YAML, while keeping it in
(1:09) Smart home vs automated home
(1:16) The beginnings of beta
(1:21) Bringing in a community manager
(1:27) Discord changes
(1:30) What’s next for the community – Home Assistant Day announcement
(1:34) What do you want to see evolve in the community?
(1:41) How the community can support Home Assistant
There was a live Q&A after the live stream on our Discord using their new Stage function, but you had to be there to have enjoyed it, no catching up on that one.