Modern teams spend their days designing pipelines, modelling architecture, and wrestling with requirements — but what happens when those same skills escape the office and take over your home?

Learn how tinkering at home teaches lessons about requirements, error handling, resilience, scope creep, and communication — and how those lessons flow back into your day job (but in a fun way)

You will see how a simple “let’s automate a light switch” experiment spiralled into a full‑blown, event‑driven, high‑availability, occasionally‑over‑engineered home automation ecosystem. A house that thinks for itself. Of course, it includes some PowerShell but that is not the main focus of this session

No home automation experience is required — just curiosity and a willingness to laugh at the familiar chaos of scope creep.

We’ll look at how personal tinkering projects become powerful learning tools: how designing a reliable smart‑home workflow mirrors building production‑grade systems; how debugging flaky sensors teaches you more about error handling than any textbook; and how “disaster recovery” takes on new meaning when your heating system depends on your YAML being valid.

Along the way, we’ll explore the two‑way learning loop between home and work: how professional practices improve your home automations, and how home automations sharpen your professional instincts.

You’ll leave with new ideas, a few cautionary tales, and a renewed appreciation for how fun, messy, and surprisingly educational side projects can be. Whether you’re building a cloud platform or just trying to stop your lights from turning off while you’re in the shower.