For those who may be new, or even for those who have been around for some time, my name is Joshua Colp and I hail from New Brunswick, Canada. I’m one of the two Atlantic Canadians at Sangoma. You might also know me as “file” or “jcolp” across the Asterisk project.
With my recent promotion to the Asterisk Project Lead position at Sangoma I thought it best to introduce myself for those who may not be familiar with me. Let’s start with my history with the project!
My adventure with Asterisk began in the early 2000s while in High School. I discovered Asterisk on Google, installed it on my laptop, placed a phone call to another system, and was instantly enthralled by it. I continued learning what Asterisk was capable of and playing with it ultimately resulting in looking at the source code to understand what was going on. Since that moment I’ve been hooked on it. I contributed some changes, participated on IRC, and did issue triage during the early years.
A few years later I formally joined Digium at the time as a software developer working on Asterisk. I started out fixing bugs but then started design and far reaching changes elevating my presence within the project. In recent years some of the major things I’ve been involved with are the PJSIP support, the stream support, and SFU support. Chances are that every time you use Asterisk you’re using something I’ve written.
This journey has now led me to be the Asterisk Project Lead, overseeing a full time Asterisk team of 4 people at Sangoma and interacting with dozens of community contributors. You might wonder what exactly that means so I’ll explain a bit. My job is to take input from multiple places (from teams within Sangoma, from the community, from the industry) and ensure that the Asterisk Team at Sangoma are working on the things we should be working on. I interact with other teams at Sangoma to support them and help them with their own plans. You’ll find me in the community doing issue triage of Asterisk issues, code reviews, providing input on discussions, and helping in our various places (community forums, IRC, mailing lists). Finally I’m also the public figure of Asterisk at conferences such as AstriCon doing presentations and spreading the word of Asterisk. If you see me at any, don’t hesitate to say hi! I’m sure there’s other things I’m forgetting I do but these cover the major things.
As Project Lead I’m excited for the future of Asterisk and look forward to the release of things in the pipeline, and beyond!
