I'd love to hear more about this - do you do it professionally (for preventative reasons), as a side hobby, or as an attacker for malicious/selfish reasons? No judgement, genuinely curious as it takes a certain personality type to do this kind of work and I find it really interesting.
a1studmuffin
Q. How do you know an open source project is written in Rust?
A. Don't worry, they'll tell you.
It's up to you to make it cloudless, but Home Assistant is the only solution I know of out there that even allows this possibility. I refuse to use anything in my home that requires a third party app or cloud connection (aside from initial pairing so I can flash it with ESPHome or some other local-only firmware). Admittedly it complicates things, but the payoff is so worth it.
And it's so nice having zero dependence on the cloud. If the internet drops out, everything still works, including the mobile app.
Even well-intended messages can be suffocating. All it takes is an explosion in popularity due to circumstances outside your control (like we're seeing here), and suddenly you're inundated with GitHub issues, PRs, conversations, important decisions, critical incidents that need a response and so on. Even if you're full-time on it and salaried (which most open source devs aren't), you simply can't keep up with the volume - dozens, hundreds or thousands of other contributors trying to contact you, debating every aspect of your decisions, technical and social. The toll on mental health can be significant, especially to those personalities who like to stay organised and on top of things.
It's the year of the voice for Home Assistant. Given their current trajectory, I'm hopeful they'll have a pretty darn good replacement for the most common use cases of Google Home/Alexa/Siri in another year. Setting timers, shopping list management, music streaming, doorbell/intercom management. If you're on the fence about a Nabu Casa subscription, pull the trigger as it helps them stay independent and not get bought out or destroyed by commercial interests.