Headworx

I really liked the Lex Fridman's recent interview with David Heinemeier Hansson (aka DHH) - the 37signals / Ruby on Rails guy. Many topics, but the small teams theme has really resonated with me. I was a solo programmer for about 20 years, starting with Sinclair ZX Spectrum in 1983 and going through several jobs including the company I cocreated in 1992, which grew up to around 300 people ten years later. This solo experience has spoiled me. I was the product manager, the ux designer, the architect and the coder. And that was extremely efficient. Of course the solo approach has limits to the scalability, as there are only 2 hands and 24 hours in a day, no matter how much money you throw in. So at some point I had to give up and cede the tasks to the team. And that was so immensely frustrating. Despite the team being many developers (I still tried to keep the architect role), things started going super slow. I was spending countless hours teaching, explaining, then explaining again ...

Utilities move slowly. But ultimately they do. Half a year ago I installed the Home Assistant multi-channel energy meter which has  clearly shown the energy usage patterns. I had known before my addiction to hot bath every day cost me dearly. And it was really the lowest hanging fruit. Water boiler is the most efficient and available energy storage . After seeing the usage patterns, I was planning to switch to variable energy pricing plan. But filling the related paperwork was tedious enough to procrastinate. Until the utility offered the helping hand: switch to energy pricing with just a single "yes" click on their web site. No paperwork, no nothing.  A couple of days later the confirmation of the switch arrived. Plus I have online access to the formal energy meter readings. No Home Assistant integration yet, but the patterns and values match with what I have, which is reassuring. I need to get used to this a bit (although the main patterns have already been preprogrammed)....

This one is quite interesting and I am yet to collect the hard evidence on what really happens. Long story short: Home Assistant can, behind the scenes, drain battery in a smart watch. It all leads back many months ago when I started seeing my Garmin fēnix  watch dead every morning. I mean ALMOST every morning. Normally it can run for 1-2 weeks on a charge and suddenly every morning it was dead, despite being fully charged on the day before. I tried different things - software/firmware update of course, changing some parameters (but it had been working fine before) - no lasting improvement. Until this June (after having extensive travel period - US West Coast, twice to China and then Europe), when I realized that it did not lose the battery when I was away from home. I started thinking on what was so special at home that the watch, left for the night on my bedside table, was losing the charge completely. There was one idea that came to mind: Home Assistant. And to be precise: ...

It has been almost 6 full months since (after long procrastination) I finally completed the home energy monitoring project . In short: Home Assistant + Circuit Setup energy meter based on ESPHome. Long story short: all has been working flawlessly. There have been multiple routine firmware updates (they are released ~monthly). To be honest I have not paid (almost) any attention to them. Luckily nothing got broken, but equally Home Assistant could be releasing one update per year. This is a side observation, but generally people are fed up with software updates. Even if they go flawlessly, there is always the risk of something getting broken. I've been hearing the same from our customers: you release too frequently (we used to every 6 months, but now there is the pressure to release at most once a year). Ove the 6 months I have learned quite a lot about my usage patterns. Daily hot bath is an energy hog, but I can easily run the boiler when the energy is least expensive (=middle of ...