Summing-up the month of 'What the heck?!'
Franck Nijhof
A month ago, I wrote a blog post, starting our first month of “What the heck?!” (WTH) ever! An experiment and without any expectations, as we never had done anything like this before. But WTH, why not. 😁
And today, I think we can actually say: All good things come to an end.
It has been an amazing month! A whopping 746 topics have been created in the WTH forum, that together collected over 4,500 posts. The contents of all these created topics are amazing! And apparently, you all agreed on that, as a stunning 2,600 likes have been given on all those posts.
About the content, it is amazing! There was some really good feedback in there. Annoyances made many people think: “Yeah! What the heck?!” and more importantly, developers chimed in as well!
Developers dived in and started resolving and fixing stuff! At the moment of writing, a whopping 68 pull requests with code changes to address those WTHs have been made. A lot of these are already shipped with the 0.115 birthday release.
So, what was fixed?
Let’s take a quick peek at stuff that was reported and fixed/addressed/improved (in no particular order):
- Duplicate Automation Button
- Manage sidebar/menu items (hide/add/move)
- Stop requiring magic to enable templates
- WTH can I not use the update button while running an NGINX HA proxy
- How the heck can I set this user picture?
- Why the heck isn’t there any official macOS desktop app?!
- What the heck turned my light on?
- Reload integrations individually
- Why doesn’t a trigger platform for state attributes exist?
- WTH why can’t I permanently delete jinja2 tutorial in the template editor
- WTH why can’t an administrator change a user’s password
- WTH: Can’t we see which trigger fired an automation?
- Set static IP in supervisor
- WTH: Why can’t I use “for” without defining a “to”-state in automations?
- Option to template the keys in data_template in addition to only values
- WTH Slack no username/icon customization
- Dev Tools –> Template – WTH isn’t it refreshing automatically?!
- Why the heck is a restart needed for each an every change to configuration.yaml? (Partly solved, much progress is made available already)
- WTH do pressing update button doesn’t have confirmation
- WTH can’t I click outside of a dialog to close the dialog?
This list isn’t even complete, but gives a nice idea of what went on. We think
it is an impressive accomplishment. If you are a bit into GitHub, you can find
all pull requests made for the month of WTH
Closing the WTH forum & Hacktoberfest
As said, all good things come to an end. We are going to close the WTH forum. This means that no new WTH topics can be created, but everything will remain visible.
Hacktoberfest is right around the corner and all current data in that forum can really help drive it. It is a great resource for developers to find opportunities to contribute on during the October month. So, while we close it down, we hope more will be addressed.
Why not run this WTH all the time? Well, it looses its power over time. This is already visible right now when comparing the velocity at the beginning and end of the month.
However, let’s see if we can do it again next year. Maybe, we should combine it with Hacktoberfest in 2021?
How did you experience the month of WTH? Should we do it again?