Last week I attended Astricon 2017, in Orlando, FL. I’ve attended every Astricon since 2007, each time as a speaker – and last week was the first time as a sponsor. People normally believe that companies sponsor things in trade shows according to the exposure they want to get, that is normally true. However, for Greenfield, sponsorship meant something else. We wanted to sponsor something that meant something for us, which means, an event within the conference we feel close to and see a value to the community. As a result, we’ve decided to sponsor Dangerous Demos, which had become during the past few years one of the highlights of the show. To those who are not familiar, Dangerous Demos is a section of the show, where talented developers/makers/inventors will come up on stage, showing off a cool thing they created – preferably, during the course of the conference or demoing a cool proof of concept. Why does Greenfield have an affinity to Dangerous Demos? Simple, as the makers of cloudonix.io we see ourselves and makers and innovators, thus, we felt that putting our name on this section would best represent the things we believe in.

Now, while most of the demos that were presented indeed showed original work and high level of talent, I can’t stress out how disgusted I was with “false dangerous demos” that came on stage. With all due respect, going on the stage and showing off a feature of a commercial product is simply not the spirit of dangerous demos. This is all about being original, being cheeky, walking on the bleeding edge willing to fail publicly and having a good laugh about it. For me, Dangerous Demos is very much like climbing Mt. Everest – We climb it because it’s there and its a challenge. We want to climb it with our feet and grit, not reach the top of the mountain with a helicopter. Yes, indeed the feature shown by company X or Y had talented people work on it, but there is no risk associated with it – as the feature simply works.

This years’ Astricon marked a special occasion, this was the first time that all leading Open Source VoIP projects participated in the show: Asterisk, Freeswitch, Kamailio, OpenSIPS and Homer. Now, for those who are new to this community, this would seem like something trivial and meaningless. For someone like me, who had been with these projects for over a decade, it’s nothing short than a miracle for something like this to happen. Some may not know this, but Freeswitch developer were originally working on the Asterisk project, while OpenSIPS developers were originally working on the Kamailio (OpenSER) project. The projects branched off due to differences of opinions between people, hence the splits. For example, while Freeswitch people were a little fed-up with the methodology with which Digium was accepting patches to the project, the OpenSIPS project people wanted to go to a more “market oriented” product, while the original OpenSER was fairly “Academic” in nature. The diversity of people and diversity of opinions is the thing that drove all these projects to their success. Nonetheless, when the projects split, some invisible “bad-blood” could have been sensed. Since the various splits, over a decade passed and I believe that the various projects had come to accept one another. Where one project took one path, the other took another, eventually turning each project into its own unique being, instead of being a mere competitive clone. I’ve known most of the people involved in these projects and their creation over the years and during previous years, it was always hard to get them to talk, due to these feelings. Last week was the first time that some of them met face-to-face in over 12 years, which was impressive. I’m not sure exactly who is the person behind this “summit of the minds”, but who ever they are, they need to keep this up and make sure that the projects keep on innovating and succeeding.

Now, let’s talk content. The overall panel of talks and presentations that Astricon boasts is nothing short of amazing. The sheer number of speakers and subjects turns the event to something that is sometimes confusing and hard to attend. Multiple talks at the same time, on 4-5 different tracks, with multiple points of interest always pose a hard choice – “What should I attend?”. However, this year was one of the most packed ones. For example, during the pre-conference day (AKA: DevCon), RedHat held a “NFV Track” which I really wanted to attend, but couldn’t, as I was attending DevCon. I wanted to attend some of the container talks, but couldn’t, as I was either talking at the same time – or was attending a different talk as well. In other words, I really hope the Video’s are good, as I would be truly disappointed. In this respect, I really like KamailioWorld. This one has one track, mostly technical in nature – and you can attend all the talks. It’s not because there aren’t enough speakers, I’m confident that many people answer the call-for-papers, it’s simply a choice of the organizers. In the past, Astricon used to have 3 tracks, thus the choice was simpler. I believe that maybe adding another day to the conference, or changing the format a little bit will enable people to get more from the conference.

I have other thoughts, but I believe these are the primary ones. C’ya all again next year @Astricon 2018.