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THE README PODCAST // EPISODE 5

Keeping the lights on with Home Assistant

Maintainer Paulus Schoutsen balances function, innovation, and playfulness.

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Paulus Schoutsen

The ReadME Project amplifies the voices of the open source community: the maintainers, developers, and teams whose contributions move the world forward every day.

Paulus Schoutsen // @balloob

Originally from the Netherlands and now based in California, Paulus Schoutsen has always been fascinated by data, and how it could be used to optimize people’s lives. Seven years ago, he open sourced a simple way to remotely turn his house lights on at sunset. Today, Home Assistant has grown to an entire home automation framework with a worldwide community. Hear Paulus share his path to programming, including his early experiments and a deep-rooted love for open source, now on The ReadME Podcast.

Paulus: We’ve built such a cool world of stuff that you can do in such a cool community and there’s so many tutorials around. We want to make it more accessible to people.

Brian: That’s Paulus Schoutsen, maintainer of Home Assistant. And this is The ReadME Podcast, a GitHub podcast that takes a peek behind the curtain at some of the most impactful open source projects and the developers who make them happen. I am bdougie aka Brian Douglas…

Kathy: And I am Kathy Korevek. In this episode, we speak with Paulus Schoutsen, whose project Home Assistant has taken automation by storm. Originally from the Netherlands but based in California, Paulus did not study computer science but came to automation circuitously, fascinated not only by data but how best to use data to optimize people’s lives. Now, with many of us at home for work and play, his work has become all the more paramount, and there’s a generous streak of playfulness in it too. Please join us for a conversation where we speak with Paulus about his path to programming, his early experiments with Home Assistant and his love for open source.

Paulus: I’m born ‘86, so I’m now 34 years old. It was the year the Pentium 60 megahertz, the first Pentium was released. And so just before that, my parents were like, oh, maybe we should get a computer, they think this was a good investment for the youth because it was going to be the future. And so first they bought an old XT computer and then a bit later they were like, no, we need to really invest in a real computer because that one they had bought second hand.

And so yeah, they bought a Pentium 60 megahertz, which back then was I think four or 5,000 guilders I mean that’s before we had the Euro. So this is in the Netherlands where I was born and raised.

On that computer, I would just always be doing stuff on it and breaking it. So pretty much every weekend we would go back to the computer shop and they would have to teach me how the computer works. So like, oh, you could actually make folders, you don’t have to put everything in the root of your file system. And I kept breaking everything all the time. So that was fun. Back then, they would fix it and I would look over the shoulder of the repair people. And I mean, back then, I wasn’t really programming much. I mean, I was really young, right? So I just did some HTML sometimes, I mean, JavaScript wasn’t really-

Brian: Yeah, barely a thing.

Paulus: Yeah. It was barely a thing and the resources were very poor, right? It was before MDN, you couldn’t find where to start really. Ajax wasn’t even invented yet. But yeah, I would play a lot of games and stuff and of course it was a very underpowered machine, but it was a lot of fun. And then, I mean, I guess a couple of years after that, I got my own computer, 166 megahertz computer, an AMD, I think.

Brian: Wow, beefy.

Paulus: Yeah! We had a LAN at my house, so we had a co-ax based lan, so it’s like an old school one where you had to have coax cable between each computer and then stoppers at the end and those cables always got loose and I have an older brother, so we would play games on the network a lot.

Kathy: Did you ever build any mods or anything for Doom or any of the other games?

Paulus: I would play sometimes with doing some graphics, get into stuff, but my programming career started way later than that. Yeah, no, my programming career started more during high school. I was playing an online browser-based game called Utopia. It’s like every hour, you’re landed at your own progresses and you can steal from other lands or attack them and you have your own team and I used to write a lot of PHP to kind of like cheat in the game and I built a data system that collects all the data, I could detect things that others couldn’t see. So it was easier to win.

But that’s where I started, with PHP, and the LAMP stack, I guess it’s called nowadays or whatever the Linux Apache, MySQL. Yeah, I spent a lot of time doing that kind of stuff. And then I mean, nowadays I do a lot of Python and JavaScript for open source, but Python didn’t really start until university where at some point I was like, I should do something else than PHP.

Kathy: Was that where you got the bug to work with hardware or work with the physical and software space?

Paulus: No, I think that really just got... by accident. I work on home automation and in 2012, at the end of 2012, Philips Hue was released and then I bought the Philips Hue hub and three lights, super expensive. It’s like over $200 for three light bulbs, it’s insane. But it had an API, so that’s why I started coding. And I think also it didn’t click until way later that I realized how much fun it is to program something and have something in the real life change. Because it’s very satisfying to see something of your work besides just having, I don’t know, a red square appear on your website or something, it’s just like, yeah, I see that all the time, but the light turning on that is very satisfying.

Kathy: Yeah, totally. I mean, I was thinking about this like that first hello world experience for hardware developers is turning a light off and on. So that was your magic moment? Was that with the Philips Hue light?

Paulus: Yeah. I created an API to control it or I created a library Python script, and then I was like, but I need to do something with this. I built this tool but I need to use it. So then I wanted the lights to turn on when the sun was setting, but then I realized it was turning on actually too late when the sun is setting, it’s already too late, so we need an offset. Then I realized the lights were being turned on when people were not home. So I needed to check if people are home so I had to add presence detection and it kept snowballing and snowballing, snowballing and now here we are, seven and a half years later.

Brian: Home Assistant is a project that Paulus created, maintains and is now used by so many different households across the world. Interestingly, his early days of tinkering with the game, Utopia, set the groundwork for what he would end up doing with Home Assistant. Utopia is basically a bunch of data streams.

You monitor the various data streams for values or a sequence or combination of values that means something interesting happened. In response to that, you want to trigger some action.

This is exactly what Paulus is doing with home automation.

He’s monitoring streams of data, times of day, presence, and the like to decide when to turn lights on and off. And that’s also what differentiates “business information systems” degrees from “computer science” degrees. It’s all about making business decisions from streams of data. Paulus seems to agree.

Paulus: So Utopia it’s text-based games, so you extract a lot of data. It’s just all numbers that you’re seeing, there’s no graphics or no meaningful graphics. It’s just decorative. And with home automation, it’s very similar, right? We want to read out what’s happening in your house, we want to read out the sensors, we want to read out the state of your life, what you’re playing and then allow the user to create rules on top of this.

And actually, this is also what I studied. So I did not study computer science, I studied business information technology, and this is a hybrid study in the Netherlands of my university, the University of Twente which it’s like half business, half computer science. So it’s actually more the software side of computer science and so it doesn’t go into processors or RAM or that low level. And then it’s very much about how to build information systems to see what’s going on and make decisions based on that. So it also matches in Home Assistant and Utopia hacking, it’s the red line in the stories. I really like seeing the data and doing stuff with it.

Kathy: Are you ever afraid of introducing a bug or something in the system that could potentially cause somebody’s home to lock them out of it or somebody lights not to go on? What does that feel like? Of being in charge of this project where people are using it for a real life situation?

Paulus: We always try to tell people, if your home automation doesn’t work, you shouldn’t be completely locked out or you shouldn’t be able to turn on the lights at all, right? I think that the computers always fail so you should always have redundancy. So light switches are very nice in that sense or keys. We also ship breaking changes, so these kinds of things happen that sometimes people see things don’t expect, but I think as long as people use home automation as we preach it, which is an enhancement and not replacement of how you do stuff in life, then it shouldn’t be a big impact, but we definitely do get complaints of people like, yeah, I updated to the nightly built, the system didn’t work and now my family is pissed.

Kathy: Yep. So how about your family, when you were tinkering around and with building Home Assistant, do you use your own home to beta the software?

Paulus: Yes, definitely. I have a funny story about that. I made this fake alarm, so I made an alarm that if the lights will be turned on in our living room while we detected that nobody was home, I knew it was an intruder because hey, how could the lights be on, it should have detected us? So then I would flash the lights red and they would remain red in the living room. But then me and my wife, we were at this at dinner and then after dinner I had shown my friend like, look, I can control my lights from a distance, but of course, then my lights turned on without anyone being home. And so they actually became red and my wife went home earlier than me and she opened the door and the house was red colored. It was live. And she knew I had built this system and so she scarily, went to every room to see-

Kathy: Oh, no! So she thought there was an intruder home-

Paulus: Yeah, she thought there was an intruder. So I had to disable that one again.

Kathy: That’s such a great story and it brings up an interesting point. How does automation work when there are several people involved and what are the ways it can be fine tuned to address all their individual needs.

Paulus: One of the first things I added was presence detection and so that was already very early on. I realized like, no, you need to make sure that everybody is taken into consideration because a lot of home automation is when people try to do too much invasive things, it’s not going to fly. So for example, if you wanted to dim the lights when you start playing a movie in your living room, well, that might not be feasible if people are reading books at that time, right?

And if an automation is annoying you a couple of times, you’re gonna to turn it off. Because then, if you have to take your phone anyway so many times, it’s not going to work. So I think a lot of these automations that I have for example, are very much like, oh, let’s turn on this light, decorative light at 6:00 in the evening and then have it turned off automatically at 12:00. Or I have one there, turn on my camera light when I start the webcam on my computer so that my setup is ready for streaming. These are the kind of things I do now and my kids can play music with their cards so they can scan their own cards in the living room to play songs, which they like a lot.

Brian: Can you go into more detail about how you set this up for your kids because we know you have some young kids, but there’s a very unique take to what you build with Home Assistant.

Paulus: So in Home Assistant, we can control, of course, media players. And so we can control, and there’s a bunch of media players out there that you can pretty much send a URL to and they will play whatever media is on the URL. So popular examples are either the Google Home or the Nest nowadays, the mini, or the Sonos speakers. You can just send the URL of a song and it will start playing that and this allowed me... So that’s part one of the story. Part two of the story is we have...there’s these microcontrollers from China now that it’s called ESP chips. They are like Arduino compatible. So I think they started as an Arduino clone, but they actually have wifi included and you can buy them for one and a half, $3, including shipping.

I mean, shipping is two months, but after those two months you have them and those microcontrollers are great because they have wifi, they can actually easily interact with Home Assistant. So we have another piece of software which is also a part of our Home Assistant umbrella called ESP Home. And ESP Home is a piece of open source software where you can write just a configuration file and it will generate firmware so that those small chips will do what you want. And so we wrote a firmware that will allow you to scan NFC cards.

So you connect an NFC scanner to this microchip and this is audio, so it’s difficult to show and also I don’t have one here, but we made very thin scanners that are even smaller than a phone that you can just put inside your house and then you have NFC cards, which look like bank cards or access badges, but then printed with covers of songs and when one of those is scanned, it’s sense, hey, this card is scanned in this room to Home Assistant and then the Home Assistant you can program, hey, when this card is scanned, play this song or play that song.

And so, what happens is that when my son was one year old, he was already able to control the music in our living room because he knew if I put this card over here, I hear a beep and it will start playing the song. And so this is a project that we’ve launched, we’ve had the prototypes running around but actually last year we really polished it up. So it’s very easy for everybody to use this kind of system in their house. And all of this is open source, right? So we have the firmware open source, the way to generate that firmware, ESP Home open source, Home Assistant open source, the 3D printed case, the schematics, how to solder it yourself, everything is open source.

Because we think it’s just a really fun thing, but it’s not commercially viable because of the licensing and like printing covers on cards and these kinds of things. And so we just want as many people to play with it and have fun with their kids. So yeah, that’s one of the projects we’ve been working on in the last year.

Brian: Everything about Home Assistant is open source. That aspect is very important to Paulus and it may be the exact reason why it’s grown in such an organic and effective way.

Paulus: The way we do Home Assistant is we try to make it more user-friendly, right? We started very technical as every open source project, it was a command line application, text files, and we’ve been trying to get it more friendly, add more user interface, because we feel like we’ve built such a cool world of stuff that you can do in such a cool community and there’s so many tutorials around. We want to make it more accessible to people.

Kathy: Is that where the Home Assistant Blue hub came into play, where it’s like a plug and play?

Paulus: Yeah. But because what we saw is that we spent a lot of time working on making things easier to use the interface, the onboarding, it discovers everything, it guides you into doing the right thing, but all of that can only happen once you have installed Home Assistant and without Home Assistant Blue, what you have to do is you have to buy a raspberry Pi, you have to buy an SD card, you have to download the image, you have to flash that image to the SD card with a third party program like the Raspberry Pi image flasher and then you have to plug it all in, and then you can get started.

And just those instructions are already like, whoa, that’s just too much for a lot of people. We know we’re not accessible to everybody, we’re trying really hard but just set it up for your friends and family, because then when things break, they can also come to you and so that way you can still work.

And we’re getting to a point now, and this is where with Home Assistant Blue, where we’re really thinking, no, actually it’s good enough and it’s not going to be as easy as like Philips Hue hub, an IKEA hub, the absolute basics, because we just do too much. But I think for people that use those hubs run into its limitations and feel that they want to automate more in their house or they cannot connect with everything, then it will be easy for them to get started with Home Assistant.

Brian: And are you looking to expand the user base or the model user, because you mentioned DIY enthusiast? Are you looking to eventually say, hey, if middle school kids, elementary school kids want to try Home Assistant, is there a goal to expand the range of who can leverage?

Paulus: Yeah, there are kids that are actually playing with Home Assistant and I think we get to a level where it’s possible, right? I think Raspberry Pi is very accessible and you don’t even have to install on a Raspberry Pi, you could even just run it on your computer. And I think that the goal is that people like my parents who are not super tech savvy would be able to set it up. I don’t think that the goal is not for them to use the full system, right? But I want them to be able to turn on the lights, create simple automations, these kinds of things.

And so actually, when you look at the features we introduced, like one last year, we realized our automation engine is too complicated, so we introduced what we call blueprints, which is like a recipe. So instead of having to write your full automation, you just say the motion sensor in this light and this light in this room, connect them together with this recipe and the recipe will make sure the light is being turned on when you move in the room.

Brian: Hearing about this project makes me realize the playfulness in it all. But there’s also another aspect: Privacy.

Privacy is in the subheading on Home Assistant’s repo. Home Assistant’s recommendation is don’t put your IOT data in the cloud because you are putting too much trust in those companies. Instead, users should run their network locally. You can run your Home Assistant network on your private network. This means your devices (your Nest, light bulbs, etc) are on your local network and not in the cloud.

Paulus: Seven and a half years ago, I didn’t care that much, privacy was not really a focus, it grew into the project organically because it was open source so people had to run it locally. There was no...I was not making a cloud surface for people to run home automation, instead I was running and making a home automation engine that had all the data locally. And so whenever people would link up cloud connected devices and where the data came from the cloud, like an Ecobee thermostat, for example, then actually we pull in that information from the cloud and it’s processed locally and your automation is run locally and then maybe if the result in control of the device also has to go through the cloud, we will go back to the cloud.

And yeah, that’s how the system worked because at the end it just ran everybody at home. There was no third party involved to do the automation engine. And as I think like five years into the project, so two and a half years ago, at that time, Google and Amazon are both released their assistants and they were like, instead of integrating with the existing APIs and the home automation space, they decided to build those over it, create their own APIs and tell people “You want to integrate with our stuff? Our API only talks to the cloud.”

And then I realized there’s just not a good alternative for users to actually have local home automation, these tech giants are pushing us to go through the cloud and we shouldn’t want that. And that’s really where we cemented our tagline in stone like, no, we want to be local control, privacy is a focus point and we’re not going to transition any work from Home Assistant into the cloud unless we need to. So for example, we integrate with Google and Amazon and Google and Amazon do not work with a decentralized system as we are. So we had to create a generic mailbox where Google will say, hey, I have a message for this Home Assistant instance and then we have to route it through the right Home Assistant instance, but all the processing of that message and it interacts with it is happening all locally.

The cloud is really, if we have to integrate with such systems, it’s only like relaying the message. It’s not actually doing anything. And this has actually been great because it also means if people want to sell their own systems, they can integrate with Google instead of going through our central cloud relayer they can sell them themselves because all the processing is happening locally. And I think that way users can always know what’s going on and people can also write, for example, plugins on top to get even more insight of, for example, what data is being sent to Google. If they want that, it’s an optional feature that some people want. But of course you can also say, no, I want Home Assistant to run completely offline, that’s also possible.

Brian: I think that sounds like with the open source and the DIY movement what I’m intrigued about Home Assistant and hearing you talk about this is the fact that you could own your own network and own your own devices to be able to have them on the network. So do you find that a lot of folks, they are drawn to Home Assistant for that same reason, being able to own their own data and how their devices interact on the network?

Paulus: Yeah, definitely. We have a subset of people that want to have isolated networks and really know all the pieces of data that are going on and at the DNS level block, a lot of data going out when they see devices pinging. But what I also realized is that a lot of these people will end up with issues because these devices don’t always work well with having network isolation. So for example the Google Nest hub, it’s a Google Home but with a screen and a lot of people have this isolated, so it couldn’t talk to all the things on the network, which is great because normally it didn’t have to.

But then Home Assistant, we created Home Assistant Casts. So we could actually put our user interface on the Google Nest hub, but it meant that the Google Nest hub had to talk directly to Home Assistant and it would not work in those cases. So as you grow features, you run into issues really fast and then we get those issues in our GitHub repository of like, “Yeah, I have all these different VLANs and they’re all connected, one way or the other, and now it doesn’t work, help me.”

Kathy: Yeah. Is there anything that you personally obsess over automating in your own home?

Paulus: No, not really. I think it’s just a lot of… I like fun stuff, so things that are just fun, unexpected. So for example, I have an old phone with a landline phone that you can plug into a cord and I had automated it the other day so that when you pick up, it will automatically connect to a voice box, voice over IP, and then it would call a voice over IP server on my computer and my computer would pick up and start playing an audio track. And so I have extracted an audio track from a phone call from one of my son’s favorite series. So he would pick up the phone and he would hear his favorite characters on the phone talking and it was like all obsessed with that, like the whole day, he’s just listening to the phone and he’s listening to the phone and that kind of stuff. It’s just really cool to see just how much fun they have with that. Yeah, that’s the kind of stuff that, in my spare time, I tend to tinker with.

Kathy: Paulus has been really creative with Home Assistant. And the open source community has stepped in and made the product better and better. With something as intimate as home automation, I wondered what the Home Assistant community is like.

Paulus: We have always had a really great community. I think partly that started because back in the days, home automation was really something for homeowners, right? Like you already had to be established in life, probably had a family, bought your house and now you’re spending some time in improving the house and you end up with home automation. And that actually meant we had a pretty mature audience, but I always felt like I was one of the younger people. I mean, I still don’t own my own home. So the stuff you can do in your house is a lot reduced when you can not open the walls and rewire some electricity or lights and stuff.

But from the get go, people were really helpful, always helping each other in like, oh, figure this out, figured that out because there’s also not a lot of things that are always obvious because it’s, everybody has different stuff in their house. Everybody has nowadays it’s way more uniform because people are like, okay, I’m just going to buy everything from Amazon or something like this. But we work way better if you just have something from anything--a speaker here from this brand, have a light bulb from this brand. The community kind of evolved around that. People started making videos, a lot of people are writing blog posts. We’re doing community highlights now every week where we highlight cool stuff that people are doing and I think the biggest problem with home automation is that everything is possible once you have a device built in, so then what are you going to do?

So all of a sudden, I think there’s a lot of people that, they sometimes lack the imagination of what they would do but if somebody says, oh, you could actually have the lights turn on a sunset, they’re like, boom! I’m going to do that. I want to do that. And so having these kinds of tutorials and ideas circulating has really helped our community to just get the most out of home automation and most out of Home Assistant. And yeah. I mean, right now the community is getting too big, right? Like I said, we have different levels of people, some people, they don’t want to have any UI, they want to do everything automated. So they enter a room, the lights would turn on, right?

They leave the room, the lights would turn off. There’s people that really love making dashboards. So they just want to see all the data that they can possibly see, including, is the international space center flying over? Or when is the next rocket launch? Or are there earthquakes in the area? Like a bunch of stuff they all want to see on their dashboard. And then there’s just people that are tinkering with the ESPs and they just use Home Assistant because it’s the best way to control or get inside of them. And then there’s people that are system administrators, they want to have their home network be like an enterprise lab with all the fancy stuff. They always break everything.

But yeah, it goes all over the place and I think that is just the fun of it, right? I think, oh, at our conference in December there was somebody talking about how he was in Bolivia, he had a brick factory, like making actual physical bricks to build homes and he was using Home Assistant for that and he was also using a DeepStack. So DeepStack is open source AI that is developed in Nigeria and so then he was like, it’s very cool because he was using technology from Nigeria, he was using Home Assistant and then all in Bolivia to help his brick factory be better and make more bricks.

But yeah, it really goes all over. There’s people living in RVs with Home Assistant and there’s people using it in boats and museums and schools.

Brian: Do you have another job outside of Home Assistant and contributing to the project?

Paulus: No, not anymore. No. So two and a half years ago… yeah, two and a half years ago when I got my green card... so before I got my green card, I couldn’t do anything because I’m from the Netherlands and I live in the US and so I could only work for my employer or earn money for my employer. So two and a half years ago, I started a company called Nabu Casa and so Home Assistant is all local and Home Assistant is about local control. But sometimes you want to be able to control your home while you’re away from home, so you want to have a remote control and there are also companies that do not work with decentralized, like a Google or an Amazon.

And so all these things you can set up yourself, but you need technical skills for it. And so what my company does, we call it Home Assistant Cloud, which is kind of like, funny because the name is the antithesis of what I just preached. But the idea is that you pay a monthly subscription and then we take care of all that stuff for you. So you have end-to-end encrypted remote control, you have Google and Amazon access, you have access to a text-to-speech API that you can use for free. So a lot of people like to have customized alarms in their home. Maybe they do like somebody at the door, they have face detection, they know who’s at the door, or they just want to like, yell at their kids. And that stuff is all using text-to-speech API. Yeah, so that’s how we sustain ourselves.

We have people working on it across the world, we are distributed now. And then for example, we just acquired another open source project from a maintainer that he was lingering. He had too many commitments in his real life, I’m saying, in his daily life that he couldn’t really contribute to open source or the project was stalling and it was related to our ESP chips that I was talking about. So at Nabu Casa we actually just acquired this to make sure that it stays open source and can put more resources at it. So we’re sustainable, there’s no VC funding involved, there’s no loans or these kinds of things.

We’re really funded by the users and the users fund us because we build cool and fun open source stuff. So it’s really like this iterative loop where we’re just doing cool stuff all the time. And I mean, it’s working out really well and I think it’s not expensive, it’s like $5 a month, but if you put it worldwide, there will be enough people that will chip in. So that’s been great.

Brian: I’d love to know now that folks have got accustomed to being at home, did you see an uptick in the community of folks who wanted to automate this in different parts?

Paulus: Yeah. We’ve definitely seen an uptick. I think I talked to a lot of people that are using it to turn on lights, to signal to their kids when it’s time for homeschooling when they could go online so they will have a light turn green or red to send indication. But I mean, we also see so many contributions. It’s been really insane. Hacktoberfest, it’s usually a really insane month for us, we get a lot of contributions, and real contributions. I think the pandemic really, people started staying home in March, around March, and man, it’s just been so busy.

It’s funny because we have contributors from all ranks of life, all walks of life. So we also have these people that are programmers but they have been growing in the ranks and they like now managers and they used to be flying around doing stuff and now they’re not allowed to fly around. So they’re just programming, contributing a lot or yeah. People are at home and they’re just bored. I mean, you cannot go anywhere anyway, right? So yeah. Program, program, program and I think like last month we had 800 open PRs across the organization and we keep pounding at it like reviewing, reviewing, but every time we review people get excited because their stuff got reviewed, so they want to contribute more. And so it just keeps going.

So last year, GitHub published the State of the Octoverse, the yearly stats and so last year we were the second most active Python project in the world on GitHub and with like 8,000 people involved and this was just a core. So yeah, we see it a lot and I really hope we can really go outside soon and don’t have to be here all the time. Hopefully also the contributions will go a bit lower, but I fear not because we have also grown, so there’s just more people interested in it.

Brian: Yeah. That’s great to hear.

Paulus: And it’s good. It’s success of course. But with success comes pressure, right?

Brian: Paulus, thanks so much for chatting with us, telling us about Home Assistant. I’m super excited to hear about your success during the pandemic and see the growth of just the ecosystem of home automation. So thanks for just powering through and setting the trend and yeah. Many more stars will be aligned on your repo in the future.

Kathy: Yeah, for sure. Thank you so much, Paulus. It’s amazing meeting you and getting to chat about home automation. I love it.

Paulus: Awesome. Yeah. Thanks for having me. It was great.

Brian: It was so good to speak with Paulus Schoutsen and have him on the ReadMe Podcast. To learn more about Paulus and his project, Home Assistant, please visit home-assistant.io.

I am Brian Douglas, and I am a developer advocate here at GitHub.

Kathy: And I am Kathy Korevek, I work in product at GitHub. The ReadME Podcast is a GitHub podcast that dives into the challenges our guests faced and how they overcame those hurdles. In sharing these stories, we hope to provide a spotlight on what you don’t always see in the lines of code, and what it took to build the technology that inspires us all.

Brian: It’s been really great spending time with you. The ReadME Podcast is part of the ReadME Project at GitHub, a space that amplifies the voices of the developer community: The maintainers, leaders, and teams whose contributions move the world forward every day. Visit github.com/readme to learn more.

Our theme music has been produced on GitHub by Dan Gorelick with Tidal Cycles. Additional music from Rhae Royal and Blue Dot Sessions.

The ReadME Podcast is produced by Sound Made Public for GitHub.

Please subscribe, share, and follow GitHub on Twitter for updates on this podcast and all-things GitHub. Thanks for listening!

Meet the hosts

Kathy Korevec

Originally from Alaska, Kathy’s journey into tech didn’t start out like most. Her first tech job was redoing her college’s library website, and she later helped a car dealership put their inventory online. There was also a brief stint as a pastry chef in Tennessee. But she ended up at Google in San Francisco, which put her on her path as a product manager. At GitHub, she managed the Documentation team, working to make it easier for developers to learn about products and unlock solutions to their challenges. Now at Vercel, Kathy firmly believes that great products start with good conversation, and should be built on data driven design, business goals, and, above all, put the user first.

Brian Douglas

Brian grew up in Florida, and was in full-time sales before the birth of his son inspired him to build an app—and he saw an opportunity for a new career. He taught himself how to code, and started blogging. His content caught the eye of a San Francisco tech company, and he never looked back. Now living in Oakland with his family, Brian is a developer advocate at GitHub, where he creates space for other developers to find their voice. He’s passionate about open source and loves mentoring new contributors. He’s also the host of the Jamstack Radio podcast and created the Open Sauced community.

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Co-maintaining openness

Peter Strömberg and Brandon Ringe

About The
ReadME Project

Coding is usually seen as a solitary activity, but it’s actually the world’s largest community effort led by open source maintainers, contributors, and teams. These unsung heroes put in long hours to build software, fix issues, field questions, and manage communities.

The ReadME Project is part of GitHub’s ongoing effort to amplify the voices of the developer community. It’s an evolving space to engage with the community and explore the stories, challenges, technology, and culture that surround the world of open source.

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