It’s October. For me here in North America, that means that the weather is changing… The days are a bit shorter, the nights are a bit cooler, and the leaves are changing into beautiful reds and oranges and yellows. For a telephony geek like me, it also means AstriCon is just around the corner.
AstriCon is the Asterisk community’s annual user and developer conference for those readers who might be unfamiliar with it. It’s my favorite time of the year to chat with other telephony enthusiasts, catch up on their latest projects, and keep up to date with all the changes in Asterisk. But it’s not limited to just Asterisk. There are often great talks about other projects in the open source telephony ecosystem, such as Kamailio and FreePBX, to name a couple. I have been involved with AstriCon one way or another since the beginning, and it is one of my favorite conferences.
Obviously, the format for AstriCon will be slightly different this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. That being said, while I’ll miss out on a bit of seeing my friends and associates face-to-face in the “hallway track” between sessions, I’m still looking forward to a great conference and hope to see many of you online. You may join our virtual “hallway track” by joining the AstriCon Slack channel here. The schedule includes talks on many relevant topics, including using STIR/SHAKEN to identify potential nuisance calls, using Asterisk to help solve real-world health issues in Africa, dealing with call center issues during the pandemic, E911 updates, scaling with Kamailio, and a couple of talks on using Asterisk for video calling. View the full schedule.
But wait… there’s more. In addition to the English-language tracks, AstriCon is mixing things up a bit this year by having a dedicated Spanish-language track. As a slightly-rusty Spanish speaker myself, I’m looking forward to participating in that track as well.
In addition to the two days of talks outlined above, there’s also a bonus day for Asterisk developers called AstriDevCon. At AstriDevCon, we take a deeper dive into changes in Asterisk’s source code, talk about new features we’d like to see added to the system, and help get consensus among the Asterisk developers and integrators on the process of making Asterisk better each release. If you have made changes to the Asterisk source code or are building a product on top of Asterisk, please find more information at https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/AstriDevCon and sign up today!
Whether you choose to participate in AstriCon or AstriDevCon or both this year, I know they’ll be a great way to learn new skills and exchange ideas with your peers.