A Call to Action!

Hey Everybody!

For those of you that don’t know me, my name is Matthew Fredrickson and I’m the Asterisk Open Source Project Lead. Does that mean I’m the best software developer or most prolific committer to the project? No. Does it mean I can answer every single question about using Asterisk? Not necessarily. Oftentimes it means that I get to interface with community members to see what their needs are and figure out how we as a project can better meet those needs. This also means trying to meet those needs while pushing Asterisk forward to make it the best open source telephony engine that it can be. I’ve actually been involved with the project since 2001, and so it has been amazing to me to see how much it has grown, both in codebase size and in number of contributors.

As a project, we are actually blessed with a *very* active contributor base. As of Asterisk 15’s release (over the course of the year leading up to it), we shepherded nearly 2400 different patches into the various branches that were in active development. Each one of those patches went through a code review process on gerrit.asterisk.org so that the Asterisk code base was able to continue to increase in quality and so that bugs could be caught before entering release branches.

Of late, we have had some extremely active community developers that have been working very hard to get their changes merged into the project. In fact, we have had so many lately that there have been periods of time where we have had trouble keeping up with them!

Bearing this in mind, I would like to issue a call to action to any developers interested in the project to help with our code review process – particularly those that are contributing patches to the project. It is in all of our best interests that those contributions are bug free and properly peer reviewed, but it requires selfless effort and time to make it happen.

If you are a new contributor and haven’t done it before, feel free to look at the following wiki pages to see how to get started:
https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Code+Review
https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Code+Review+Checklist

Then proceed to gerrit.asterisk.org to begin.

Thanks *so* much again to all of you that help to make the Asterisk project as lively and successful as it is! If you don’t feel comfortable reviewing code, then helping out on the mailing lists and the forums or submitting documentation are great ways of contributing back to the project as well.

Best wishes to all of you.

Matthew Fredrickson

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