Event wrap-up – GitHub Universe ’24

In case you missed it, we had a pretty huge presence at this year’s GitHub Universe, their global annual developer conference. 2024 was the culmination of many years of our community growing, and there were some really big moments—our community meetup in San Francisco, awards, rising in GitHub’s rankings, and being a part of the event’s Day 2 keynote.

After a few years of being in 2nd place, we are now the #1 open source project on GitHub with over 21,000 contributors helping build Home Assistant. We also won the Wonderfully Welcoming award for being the 2nd most active project for new contributors. This is really just scratching the surface of the week we spent together in San Francisco, and I (Missy Quarry, your Community & Social Media Manager) would like to share the highlights with everyone who couldn’t make it this year.

Table of contents

Community comes together

What started as a simple request to attend the event tumbled into not only being a part of the Day 2 Keynote of GitHub Universe ❗❗ but being offered a venue at GitHub HQ for a community meetup. It picked up from there – interviews, speaking on panels, and after-parties – this 2-day event spun into a 7-day trip to San Francisco. Not only was this my first event as a part of an open source project, but it was also my first time meeting Paulus and Frenck in person. Paulus is taller than I expected 😅 and Frenck has legs! 😱

While there is a lot of good news for us that came out of GitHub Universe (and I will get to that), I would be a poor community manager if I didn’t start this out with the first in-person meetup I coordinated for Home Assistant. 😌

I knew immediately that I needed custom swag for the event, and got to work with our Graphic Artist, Clelia. We wanted to make sure it was connected to where we were holding the meetup and that it was collectible – we landed on postcards and pins in the shape of stamps.

Limited edition San Fran postcard and badge

And, of course, you can’t go to an event without stickers, so we took our Home Assistant and ESPHome logos with an Open Home Foundation badge and made holographic stickers. ✨

The event itself ended up being a small gathering, but it was filled with amazing connections and conversations. Paulus and Frenck talked for over an hour about the status of Home Assistant and what we’re working on right now, then took questions from the community members. It was great talking to everyone who attended – being able to bring people from different aspects of life together energizes me, and I am excited to plan whatever the next meetup will be. 👀

We are number 1!

It was an honor just for Home Assistant to be asked to speak at the Day 2 Keynote; what we didn’t know when we started this ride was that the keynote would announce something new: we are the #1 open source project on GitHub by active contributors!! 🎉 Not only that, on the rankings for first-time contributors, we moved up to 2nd place, and an Open Home Foundation collaboration partner, Zigbee2MQTT, is also now in the top 10! 🥳 This is all featured in the GitHub Octoverse 2024 report, which is a really interesting read.

Our friends at GitHub did a great job of making sure we were surprised by this news—and believe me when I say we lost our collective minds when they revealed it to us. 😎 We also found out that we’ve won GitHub’s Wonderfully Welcoming Award, which recognizes how we attract and support new contributors to our project.

Open Source – ⭐️ of the show

Day 1 is when we had our booth in the Open Source Zone, but I was also set to represent Home Assistant at a panel. The session was called Cha-ching! How to attract funding for your open source projects; I was very excited to tell our story since Home Assistant is funded by y’all – the community – through our Home Assistant Cloud subscription, and not investors. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that others on the panel shared our approach to building a sustainable project through community support! I had great conversations with several people working on other open source projects like Homebrew and Ladybird.

Our booth was a great success, and we had so many members of the community come up to us to let us know how much they love Home Assistant, along with some people who had never heard of us curious to learn more. We were surprised to hear that some people had not yet tried the new Sections dashboard, which we were demoing at the booth. It was really useful to get this feedback in person. All of them took stickers. 😆

Our booth in the Open Source Zone

Day 2 was when Paulus and Frenck took the stage, and I got there early to ensure I got a good seat up front. We had not only a good crowd in person, but Joost hosted a watch party on the Community Stage in our Discord server!

Their final message to the crowd – what are you going to build?

The guys did amazing up on stage! 🤩 It was wonderful to see Paulus explain why Home Assistant was built and how it connects to GitHub’s ambitious goal of 1 billion developers. Frenck shared not only what we’ve done to grow the largest open community on GitHub, but also how the community collectively shapes the project’s direction. Kyle Daigle, a fellow Home Assistant user and GitHub COO, joined Frenck and Paulus on stage and did a really fun Home Assistant live demo. Paulus also shared how he secured the future of the project by giving it to the Open Home Foundation, and its mission to bring privacy, choice, and sustainability to the smart home. Catch their segment here, but I would recommend watching the entire keynote – GitHub is doing good stuff for new developers. 😌

After the keynote, Paulus and Frenck both did interviews, and even gave away an extra Home Assistant Green we brought to the guest speaker representing Hack Club. We spent the rest of the day on the show floor, meeting more of the community and enjoying all the fun.

Connecting with the community