And it needs people to do that. The project doesn’t have anybody with the time, experience, and desire to do that. Yes, the beta cycle would really benefit from that - a test plan and checklist to reduce the number of issues that come to light later. There just isn’t anybody in a position to do it.
That’s how everything on HA is done - people give up their time and experience to make it better.
Speaking purely personally, I couldn’t agree more - the project just needs a few volunteers who can share the load and run it.
Tinkerer
(aka DubhAd on GitHub)
Split this topic
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I’d help if I could. But I don’t have a test environment set up; one R Pi and a few sensors. And my experience level probably isn’t there yet. But if there were small, simple tasks it would be a great way to learn more.
Where I could help most would be proof-reading documentation, or even writing updates to documentation. Is there, for lack of a better term, some sort of editing board which can offer to review documentation before it’s published?
There’s both the #beta channel in the Discord server, and there’s a documentation channel too.
Seriously, the release notes got a big boost in readability when somebody, like you, stepped up and gave them a much needed rewrite. Indeed, I’d argue that the docs are one of the things needing the most love. Developers may be really good at writing code, but they’re often anything but at writing the things end users need.
+1 for never having had a problem of attitude when asking questions. I’ve not liked some of the answers, but for technical reasons. In the end always ended up with some solution.
Of course also +1 that often the documentation is lacking and the answers are often easier to find on various threads here. But that’s clearly understood from the discussion above. More examples and better descriptions of possible options parameters would help.
And yes the breaking changes are pain and having to read through many releases worth since I only have a chance to upgrade every couple of months. But I find that with backing up my config folder and docker installation going back isn’t too bad.
And yes this thing made me learn at least the basics of yaml, json and docker (not a developer in my day job) so it wasn’t all that accessible. Next I’ll have to look into that Jinja thing for templates. But I guess that’s part of the fun and understandable that at this stage one wouldn’t expect the project to have a user friendly click and drag gui for config. One day?
Anyway just wanted to leave some positive feedback in this thread that might might be “draining” for the contributors. Please keep it up. Nice job. I’m sure for every one of me, there’s 999 others happily and quietly using the project.
Its actually moving forward not backwards like your wording, its improving and fixing bugs and making integration easier. If you make things easy to use there will be more bugs, look at windows.
If you think its a headache now, its a good job you weren’t trying to use it 2-3 years ago. That was a real nightmare. Its so much more intuitive, helpful and easier to set things up now. Z-Wave control panel is a prime example of it being made soooo much easier. That was a game changer for me.
Its in a bit of a transition period as parts of the foundation HA was built on is being rewritten and improved for the future. The development pace over the past 6-12 months has been phenomenal but can’t say there is anything as all encompassing as HA.
I kinda understand where the OP is coming from (no matter if it’s his first post or not; pretty ridiculous counterargument to his frustration). Given the growing pains some stuff can break for a few weeks but that stuff happens to be the important item that you’ve had automated for a long time w/o issues until an upgrade occurs. This is why I use SmartThings SmartLighting for simple automations and certainly would choose it for natively supported hardware but it is feature lacking to say the least.
However, HA comes to the rescue when ST doesn’t support some hardware and I can use HA to MQTT or NodeRed to sync with virtual devices in ST. HA is also amazing for complex automations as I’ve completely gotten off of CoRE and WebCore. HA is ahead of the competition if you understand where it is in its life cycle and if you value the plethora of compatibility and flexibility it offers. I’m at 2 years with HA and about 4 years with ST and there’s no way ST can do things alone w/o HA being a part of my rig. So thanks to all Devs and particularly @balloob for continuing the journey… there are happy HA users indeed even with the infrequent troubles that can come up
I’d just like to say that TIME is the most precious and finite commodity any of us has, and thus is VERY expensive.
I really appreciate the time everyone puts into this project and community, and whenever I feel frustrated I try to remember how little time we all have.
This is the lesson I learned. I too left home assistant frustrated, went to smartthings for a while, and then came back to home assistant. I realized that my frustration was mainly caused by me - blindly updating and hoping everything stayed stable. Now I just: 1) take automatic backups to be able to rollback at any time, 2) read the release notes to understand what changed, 3) making any necessary compatibility changes first before upgrading, and the most important 4) only update when i need to and am in the position to troubleshoot and resolve issues as needed.
A completely non-productive approach to solving problems is to avoid seeking free help from an enormous community ready to assist you.
He/she has no track-record of seeking assistance from this community. The first post was “Leaving Home Assistant, not worth the headaches!”
Headache relief was readily available but they chose to suffer privately and in silence. Not a very effective strategy but they are free to choose whatever they believe is best for them, including moving on to another product.
Update only when needed? Yer kinda damned if ya do, damned if ya don’t. Yep, every release and update has required a bit of scrambling on my part. I now schedule dedicated “debug and fix-the-break” time for each update, which I do religiously 'cause I’m seen too many comments of people holding off on upgrades (ie 0.6x.x to current) and finding so many “break-fixes” and updates that they are overwhelmed and either start from scratch or walk away in disgust.
“every release and update has required a bit of scrambling on my part” - That was my experience in the beginning as well. But you need to match your behavior and skills to the current state of the platform.
This is an automation platform for tinkerers and coders. If you’re not going to put in the effort (patience, reading, troubleshooting, learning, resolution, gratification), then this is not the platform for you. Some people put in the effort constantly while other put in spurts (ex. only upgrade when needed). If you are willing to put in the effort, my advice is to leverage the release notes, documentation, community, discord, github code, google, etc. If not, put this product and community behind you.
I certainly don’t disagree but there’s an assumption that the community would be able to fix/help immediately and alleviate the problem. Some problems in my 2 years with HA were only alleviated by waiting for the fix in the next release.
Having said that, every time I bring something here I definitely get my hand held and don’t feel like I’m being talked down to… but I’ve been a nerd for 26 years and troubleshoot computers for a living. However, I do see newbies getting chastised here and there by a selected few unhappy individuals I know that none of us are blind to that notion and can recognize how that can be de-motivating when posting your issue.
But then, most of the less experienced seem to have no experience with asking questions either. Starting a post with a rant is a guaranteed flamefest. I thought Facebook was a different platform? Nah kidding, but seriously, I see so many people asking a question without properly telling us what the problem is.
E.G. my lights dont turn off, what can I do? No specifics, nothing. Or like the OP never asked a single question to anyone but still blaming the devs for HA being bad.
I understand that newcomers might have a hard time, but they also have to understand that it is open source, that the devs that work on this mostly do it in their free time for nothing! That the project is still a beta (at least to me it is) and that there are so much alternatives that are much easier to use (like smartthings or homekit for example). I understand that that changes the pricepoint as well as homekit devices tend to be expensive, but hey I can’t fix cars, so I am probably always going to pay more for car repairs than someone that does know how that works.
Also like someone already said, this community is more than willing to help anyone with their problems, but then again if no questions are asked at all and only rants then obviously people will become salty as well.
It’s never a proud moment in the community’s history but it springs from a source rarely discussed here. People who help others can become equally frustrated when helping shamelessly unprepared users.
That frustration is not expressed by writing “I’m fed up” posts but by delivering pointed, undiplomatic answers to, what are perceived to be, lazy questions. I’m not justifying it but simply pointing out that ‘frustration’ isn’t limited to new users.
Over on the openHAB forum, they felt compelled to explain in detail “How to ask a good question / Help Us Help You”. Why? It’s an attempt to reduce the incidence of “I didn’t do any research” questions. The task of answering under-researched questions is no pleasure for anyone.
Very astute observation. The dedicated volunteers who pour their heart and soul into this project are justifiably frustrated with those kinds of questions.
But to some extent, I see both newbies and old hands as victims here. It’s not easy for someone without a lot of background in all the different OSs and languages to get a handle on where to begin. So they ask stupid questions they couldn’t find answers to themselves.
The search capability here isn’t really that great. I find I use Google “site:home-assistant.io” if I really want to find something specific. And when I do find something, it’s often so full of abbreviations, jargon, missing steps and assumptions about stuff I have yet to learn that it’s hard to know if it’s going to answer my question or not.
I have (finally) hit a point where I can often find things on my own, and can generally phrase a question such that a more seasoned user or developer can actually help. And the help has been fantastic! Thanks!!
When I do get help, and get whatever it was working, I try to give back by posting, in detail, in simple language, what I found and what I did. That was something I found really helped me when others did it.
Very valid point! There were no specific details in the OP… so what help can one expect to get. I spend days researching before posting extremely complete evidence whether here or on GitHub. You’re right that there’s a vast difference in folks where some help themselves by providing some details rather than just complaints.
I would have NEVER been successful getting HA to work without help from people from this forum. They have filled in the gaps when the docs were simply lacking details I needed (which is often). Thanks!
I know that none of us are blind to that notion and can recognize how that can be de-motivating when posting your issue.