The month of 'What the Heck?!' 2022

TL;DR: For all of October, we are opening up to report any issue, suggestion, or annoyance you have with Home Assistant on the forums!

Welcome to the month of “What the heck?!” 2022! 🎉

Two years ago, we had the first month of “What the heck?!”, and it was great! So, this year, for the entire month of October, we are doing it again!

Home Assistant is growing fast, and the development pace is high! Every month’s release almost feels like a birthday present, full of new features and improvements. But did everything turn out the way it should? Are there things missing? Could it be streamlined more? Or, worse, maybe something started annoying you?

That is what this month is about!

Lowering the barrier for sharing WTH?! moments

We realize reporting bugs on our GitHub might be a steep hill and, for some, maybe even a bit scary (although you shouldn’t be). You need a GitHub account, report an issue following issue templates and forms, and the report itself needs to be written in a way a developer can work with it. Above all, 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 your “What the heck?!” moments, small tweaks, and improvements that can make us all enjoy Home Assistant even more.

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. More importantly: discuss and vote on topics your fellow home automators have brought up.

What are we looking for?

Last week I’ve sent out a Twitter message asking:

Enlighten me 💡 The whole community would celebrate and be shedding happy tears of joy if just this tiny little thing was added to Home Assistant…

The goal of that question: finding those little additions, annoyances, inconsistencies, and more. Things that, if addressed, could make a big difference or provide a more streamlined experience, making Home Assistant even more enjoyable.

I’ve got a whopping 200+ responses to that tweet, and the truth is: Most of them are exactly what this month is about! I’ve picked a few of them to show you what I mean:

• Helper entity to add/sum multiple sensor values like multiple energy metering sensors. (@NoahM_M)
• More of an app thing maybe, but moving the top dashboards view menu to the bottom when on the phone. (@teachingbirds)
• It be great if automations were aware that another process/interaction/human had changed a setting. E.g., if I turn the lights back up, I don’t want the auto-dimmer to continue auto-dimming. “Abandon automation if the state is modified,” or something. (@jameswood)
• Being able to select (using the mouse) the time period I want from a graph instead of manually selecting hours/days from the dropdown would be a great improvement in my humble opinion! (@WouterSchoot)
• Toggling two lights should put them all in the same state. So if 1 light is on and 1 off, toggling them together should make them both on, then next toggle turn both off. (@balloob)
• Option to retain associated history when renaming entity id (@SadGamerGeek)

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

We are looking forward to all the things that will be brought up! And are hoping it will be just as successful as the previous edition.

Join us on the forums!, or read the FAQ below.

So, when does Home Assistant trigger this moment for you?

Hacktoberfest 2022

This is not just the month of “What the heck?!”, it is also the month of “Hacktoberfest”! 🎉

Hacktoberfest is a worldwide, month-long celebration of open source. An event open to everyone. Whether you’re a developer, student learning to code, documenter, or designer, you can help drive open-source projects, like Home Assistant.

The idea is that open source projects will gather entry-level bugs, features, and small improvements that current or future contributors can pick up and address; The month of “What the heck?!”, is a great way to provide these!

By participating in Hacktoberfest and by contributing four GitHub pull requests, you will complete the challenge and earn either a free t-shirt or have a tree planted.

This year, just like previous years, Home Assistant is open to and welcomes participants of Hacktoberfest ❤️

FAQ

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

  No, please create multiple, smaller topics. There is no limitation on how many forums topics one can create for WTH. 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.

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

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

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

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

• “My WTH topic is one of the top-voted ones, so it is going to be fixed/addressed, right?”

  This is not a contest. Voting will help with visibility and getting a feeling of the impact the suggestion might have. However, it might be difficult or too big to implement. Home Assistant mostly relies on contributors to address or improve the project. A topic with lots of votes is more likely to be noticed by a contributor, but it is not guaranteed to be picked up.

• “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 instead.