[asterisk-scf-dev] introductions

[Chris Kairalla]

Hello SCF list,
I just wanted to say "hi" and introduce myself.  I'm Chris Kairalla, and I teach a class at NYU called Redial.  We use Asterisk as a tool for creative telephony projects.  "Botanicalls" and "Popularity Dialer" are two well known projects that originated from the class.  Most of my students are not programmers, but we have found that Asterisk's dialplan and AGI interface are user friendly enough to be used by people who are more artists than technologists.  You can see the class syllabus here, if you like:
http://www.itp-redial.com/wiki/index.php?title=Syllabus

Although we can get a lot of good use out of AGI and the Shell() command, I believe that SCF will eventually be an even better tool for creative combinations of different communications systems.  Most of my students know Java and a scripting language like PHP or Ruby, but almost none of them have any experience with C / C++, and even then it's with a visual framework like OpenFrameworks or Cinder.  One of the things that excites me about SCF is that my students may be able to get closer to the "core" and therefore have more options for manipulating the raw data of the call.  Many of the more popular projects from the class are of the "you call an object/screen" or "object/screen calls you" variety, and SCF seems well suited for those kind of projects, especially if other programming languages are supported.

So, my primary interest in SCF is as a creative tool that allows for greater flexibility and manipulation of the phone call (or Jabber, or Skype, or Video, or whatever).  I'm happy to offer up the Redial class as a test bed of developers who are not engineers (for good or ill), but who will strive to push the usage beyond traditional call routing.

I'm also very interested in Asterisk SCF for my "day job", which is with a company called MegaPhone.  We've built out a cloud-based solution that allows us to accept 1000's of simultaneous incoming VoIP calls at 100's of calls/second.  I'd like to help out as much as I can to ensure that SCF will scale up nicely on cloud hosted services like Rackspace Cloud and Amazon EC2.

I understand that Asterisk SCF is a good year away from being usable, but I'm excited about being part of conversation as the features of SCF are finalized.  I believe that this project is happening for all of the right reasons, and I want to do what I can to make this a great next-generation communications framework.

-Chris