About Me

I'm Rolf Szimnau — CISO and Technical Advisor at Add-On Products, where I carry full responsibility for cloud infrastructure, security posture, and SaaS operations across 100+ servers. During the day that means Azure, ISO 27001, and enterprise customers like Maersk, Lego, Coloplast, Ørsted, and Bank of England. In the evening it means Home Assistant, Proxmox, and figuring out why the lawn mower stopped at 16:30 every sunny afternoon.

The home setup runs Home Assistant OS on a Proxmox VM hosted on a Dell OptiPlex 7060 — alongside ESPHome sensors, WiZ and LEDVANCE lighting, a Mammotion Luba Mini 2 — my little Flora, Roborock S5 Max, Tado heating across 5 zones, a Škoda Elroq integrated for smart charging, and a LoRa mailbox sensor 200 metres down the driveway. The network is UniFi throughout — an Ultra gateway, an 8-port switch with 4-port PoE, and two access points covering the house — with proper IoT VLAN isolation. Nothing runs in a cloud I don't control.

Twenty-nine years of infrastructure work means I approach home automation the same way I approach production systems: reliability first, no single points of failure, and every automation has to earn its place. I've also built AI agents professionally — so when Home Assistant added LLM Vision to the security camera workflow, I knew exactly what I was doing with it.

This site documents what I actually run, what breaks, and what I've learned. Guides are published in English, Danish, and German — I work fluently in all three. If you're a hardware vendor looking for a technically credible audience, the sponsorship section below is for you.