For over a decade my wife and I (and most recently our daughter) have been holidaying across the many regions of Scotland.

This year, after a few years of pondering and discussing, we’ve made the decision to change our lives and take the first major step towards realizing a dream by selling our house in the East of England, intentionally becoming homeless, and travelling to find our forever dream somewhere in the North East of Scotland.

What do you do when you have appliances housed in an external detached garage that you want notifying of upon their completion, yet they’re too old to be natively capable and you have a fervent dislike of manufacturer shipped IoT? You build your own with HomeAssistant (HA) and Zigbee devices, of course!

My washing machine and tumbledryer live a few steps away from my house in a detached garage to attempt to mask some of the whiney noise they generate and to make more room in my relatively small kitchen. Naturally, every time I put a load of washing on I either check it before it’s finished and forget about it or forget about it entirely until a few hours later.

I recently came to the realisation that my home network strategy was not working. Whilst running the stock ISP provided router/AP combo had worked fine for over a decade, my onboarding of more and more untrusted devices onto my network as well as the expansion of the network outside of my home’s four walls started to warrant an investment into better equipment.

My first thought was to try and survive with the basics: unmanaged switches and old router/AP combos running in access-point mode. This did work for a while, but I really struggled with getting roaming and bandwidth control to work nicely between the differently branded devices. In addition, I absolutely hated the lack of observability this solution provided.

I can’t help but feel that .NET is slowly slipping back into its moated roots but in an open source fashion: documentation seems to prioritise mentioning Azure above all else; new application frameworks seem to be created with the sole purpose of promoting and coupling applications to Azure; successful open source libraries are being supplanted by Microsoft-owned alternatives; and a comparable non-proprietary LSP still hasn’t and isn’t likely to be released.

How many times do you think a developer or development team has looked at some legacy or technical debt-laden software and exclaimed “this bollocks needs a complete rewrite!”? How many times do you think that same “complete rewrite” has led to disaster taking three, four, or more multiples of time than originally anticipated? I’d bet money on most. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve been in and led teams where it’s happened. It sucks for everyone involved.