At the end of this soliloquy, I pose a question with which I would love feedback. So in case you find it difficult to read long and drawn out messages perhaps you could skip to the question and provide any useful advice you might have.
I wouldn't consider my experience with Hubitat to be a love/hate relationship. I find myself either content or frustrated and currently I'm in a state of frustration.
I got my first HE as soon as I learned of its existence. The annoyances of SmartThings had worn on me and Hubitat completely eliminated those by running locally. When my C-5 arrived, I was living in an apartment and because it was my first foray into Hubitat I was initially lost. I quickly discovered that I would need to leverage the Community but I'd say I was initially intimidated by boards. I had never really spent much time on community discussion boards of the Hubitat variety. So, I tried to find alternate avenues of enlightenment after reading some of the threads and noticing that everybody knew more about home automation and the underlying technologies than I ever would, and they threw out abbreviations and/or acronyms so casually as to leave me wondering what they were even talking about by the 50th reply. But I worked my way through what for me was a steep learning curve and had my pad as automated and customized as I needed and wanted. So being finally content I just sat back and basked in the awesomeness that is Hubitat.
Fast forward almost a year (and the beginning of a pandemic) and I moved out of that decked out apartment and into my new house. I figured I'd just recreate in my house much of the automation I had already built in my apartment but that just wasn't in the cards. In my attempts to recreate the automations I encountered issues with which I hadn't previously dealt. Most of the issues seemed relatively minor so I figured I'd just pop back on the Community boards and quickly have things working again. But by the time I remembered how to get to the community site and logged on I was like Holy Snikes!!! It felt like all the effort I had put into learning everything I needed to know to setup my apartment was practically pointless. I mean I didn't know what was up and what was down as I started reading the threads I had once found so helpful. Some of the threads had seemingly grown exponentially to discuss all the iterations of apps and everything else that had developed since last I was thoroughly engrossed in the issues. I attempted to find answers to my new questions by heading to the most recent replies of relevant threads where I assumed I would find solutions with relative ease. That was a rude awakening - I didn't have enough current knowledge to fully understand what people were talking about. I figured I could read through the threads to follow their evolution but after an hour of reading the first one I was barely a quarter of the way through the thread so I knew it would take several hours to read through each juggernaut.
I'm so frustrated now I'm almost content with my frustration. I don't have the time or energy to read all the discussions to catch up on everything that has changed. But I can't think of an efficient way to parse the back and forth to find the answers I need. So, I have to use buttons or my phone to turn everything on and off and living like a caveman is killing me. But I am attempting to find some Zen in my current state of disarray. Zen and I haven't been friendly since it stole my lunch money back in the third grade though.
So.... There has got to be a better way, right?!?
Could someone please enlighten me? How does one find answers that are timely and relevant these days and how does one find them in the future when they inevitably have a life event that discombobulates their smart home? I read daily summaries of current events relevant to my job, but I sure don't want to do that for my hobby.
Surely, there is a way to stay current on items of particular interest or at least keep a finger on the pulse of Hubitat happenings that doesn't involve dedicating time to read all the notifications on saved threads or otherwise scouring the boards week in and week out.
Does anyone have thoughts or best practices to share regarding how one can either maintain current awareness of the dynamic state of Hubitat or how to just swoop in and quickly find timely and relevant answers to life's most pressing smart home questions?
Maybe if I could get a solid solution I could move beyond contentment and find true love for my HE.
