Astricon 2015 Personal Wrap Up

Astricon 2015 is now over, honestly, it flew passed us really fast – at least for me it did. I will refrain from talking about the location of it – as it is more of less a geek’s paradise when it comes to movies and amusement parks. But putting that aside, let’s talk about Astricon itself.

Where will Asterisk be in your future?

A dear friend, the CEO of fone.do, Mr. Moshe Meir had written a blog post on the fone.do blog. The title is: “Is there a future for Asterisk?”

I have a different take on the thing. I think that Moshe is simply asking the wrong question. He should be asking “What is the role of Asterisk in your future?”.

The GUI Game

Well, I think that I can understand where Elastix/PIAF are going with this. For a while now, I’ve seen various communications and rants roaming the community, regarding the way the FreePBX GUI is dominating the “Distro Market” – so to speak.

Source code and individuality

Developers! We are the modern day artists, the masters of the keyboard and the sculptors or algorithms and ideas. We turn obscure thought and imagination into real life creations, capable of doing things previously not done (well, at least not in the same form). As such, we are individuals and unique – each one of us in our own way. Whether we develop a mobile app or a web application, our unique style, way of thought, organization and coding style will be reflected into our creation – we can’t help it, this is who we are.

Can you say – antitrust?

Version control! one of the most controversial subjects in the software industry. Whether you’re a Subversion fanatic, a Git hard core or a mercurial elitist – everybody has something to say about version control. While in the past we had put our trust in local CVS and SVN repositories, today, most of use utilize cloud based services such as Github, BitBucket or Gitlab.

Wake Up !

Confession – I love sleeping! Who am I kidding, if I could sleep for 14 hours a day, I would – I truly love to sleep. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a lazy person, I’m what you would call a slow starter – for me, waking up in the morning was always a big issue. When I was younger (early 20s), my dad would comment – “if you would have been paid to sleep, you’d be a millionaire”. And that was so true, I had a good job in a start-up company, I was traveling the world – and yet, sleeping was always my favorite thing.

Statisics, Analytics – stop whacking off

Managers! Project Managers, Sales Managers, Marketing Managers, Performance Managers – they are all obsessed! – Why are they obsessed, because we made them that way – it’s our fault! Since the invention of the electronic spreadsheet, managers relied on the same tools for making decisions – charts, tables, graphs – between us, I hate Excel or for that respect, any other “spreadsheet” product. Managers rely on charts to translate the ever complex world we live in, into calculable, simple to understand, dry and boring numbers.

Don’t Replicate – Federate

For many years, the question of high availability had always circled the same old subject of replication – how do we replicate data across nodes? how do we replicate the configuration to stay unified across nodes? Is active-active truly better than active-passive? and most importantly, what happens beyond the two node scenario?

Federating Asterisk – truth or myth?

During this years’ Asterisk Developers’ Conference, one of the subjects I’ve raised an issue for Asterisk is: “Federating Multiple Asterisk Instances”. Now, for the seasoned Asterisk user/developer, the answer would be simple – use Kamailio/OpenSIPS for that scalability, and use Asterisk as a Media Gateway or application server.

Astricon, Vegas and Geekness

So, Astricon 2014 is over and behind now and I’m now sitting at the Holiday Inn in Chicago. I have to admit that moving from the RedRock resort and Casino to the Holiday Inn in Chicago – talk about a mind blowing change. Just to give a general idea, the bath room in Vegas was roughly the size of the entire room here (mental note to self – next time order something better via BA miles).