The Year of Adhearsion
I get dizzy when I think of the flash flood of memories 2007 has been. I remember what I was doing precisely one year ago as if it were yesterday:
Sitting in my cozy dormitory bedroom, the first signs of relief set in as the stretch lasting almost two months was coming to an end—I was tying up the loose ends of my first publicly released version of Adhearsion. The start of the stretch was marked by my irreverent albeit desperate sneaking into Astricon 2006, the big Asterisk conference held ironically just six miles away in downtown Dallas at which security was surprisingly lax. It was there that I first demoed an alpha of Adhearsion to respected players in the telecom industry. My demo’s reception motivated me to pursue Adhearsion further, potentially toward something big. Through connections established there, I was invited to the headquarters of Asterisk’s corporation Digium twice, wrote an article for Linux Journal magazine, and got my first notable Adhearsion speaking opportunity at Emerging Telephony 2007. That was the tipping point.
Since those days I’ve spoken at eleven more conferences and tech meetups, collected hundreds of business cards, written an Adhearsion chapter for O’Reilly’s Asterisk book, and visited three other countries and fifteen states on Adhearsion-related business. To afford the absurd amount of travel, I took up an interesting style of living I later labelled peer-to-peer living: I had no fixed residence and considered myself, basically, homeless. Throughout my travels I managed to develop a support network of individuals with couches to spare for a few days or a few weeks. Needless to say, this all came as a shock to this boy from Texas who had never been out of the South.
This fruitful year is now over, the name Adhearsion is more widely known and, as of last week, I live in a fantastic part of beautiful San Francisco. After twelve months of testing myself and countless days of personal reflection, I’ve confidently decided that Adhearsion is my career now.
Big ’08 holds a lot. In addition to continued development, I want to bring in sub-contractors to assist on increasingly substantial consulting projects and encourage others to start their own independent Adhearsion consulting practice. If you’re a Ruby developer either with VoIP experience or a genuine, keen desire to gain VoIP experience, talk to me. My email address is in the right column of this blog. If you’re a company needing a better phone system or a startup with some telephony component not yet developed, talk to me too and let’s see if using Adhearsion makes sense.
I’ll continue promoting Adhearsion in ways other than speaking at a dozen conferences. Think screencasts, video podcasts, writing, and a revamped website. Development will continue regardless of whether I have work. My first order of business is to get the version 0.8.0 gem out the door. For those that don’t want to wait, you can play with 0.8.0 in Adhearsion’s trunk.
Happy new year folks! Let’s make 2008 the year the telecom industry really changed.
