Home Assistant is 11 years old!

Blog
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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 coordinator, 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.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/09/18/home-assistant-is-11-years-old
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Wishing a system/SW a happy b-day doesn’t make a lot of sense.

But I want to congratulate the creators and all the people, that helped aging this ‘youngster’ which has grown so fast to become so mature at this age.
It’s really a big achievement and something to be really proud of but as mentioned multiple times in the stream: this wonderful community plays a big part in this.

Although I’m a member on a few, mostly technical, forums: I spend the biggest part of my online time here in exploring, reading and trying to pay forward.
It’s an interesting journey to experience how this is evolving!

:bowing_man:

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Congratulations to all Home Assistant contributors and thank you! Best wishes to the whole community!

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Happy Birthday Home Assistant! Thank you Paulus for starting us off on this yourney. You kicked off something amazing and put in a lot of effort to make it even more awsome. Also thank you to all at Nabu Casa and the community, in whatever form you participate. It is clear that every one involved invests a lot of themselves to make all of this happen, and it is a lot of fun to pick the fruits of it. I love it all!

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