Continuing the series of Developer Spotlights to promote developers who have signed up to the hackathon, we interviewed Thomas Quintana.  We hope these spotlights help all developers involved in TADHack raise their profile in the industry and discover new projects and opportunities.  Some of Thomas’s projects include: Restcomm, sipme-media-server, declarative-fsm, and freepy.

What are some of your current and past telecom app development projects?

Recently, I joined the FreeSWITCH community by developing a scalable actor based open source telecommunications application server in Python on top of the FreeSWITCH engine.  Freepy is a relatively young project with a bright future and we welcome the community of telecom developers to get involved in making it a better platform.

In the past years my focus has been on middle-ware, most recently while a member of the Mobicents community I was the founder and project lead of RestComm for approximately three years. During my time as part of the Mobicents team I also had an opportunity to work on the Mobicents Sip Servlet Containers and Mobicents Media Server.

A bit further back in time I have also built a trans-coding platform based on the WURFL database of mobile devices which has since then gone commercial and the open source version is not longer provided for download. The platform would detect the mobile device based on heuristics and trans-code multimedia content on the fly for delivery.

How did you get involved in Telecom App Development?

I actually got started in telecom app development by mistake. In approximately 2006 I created a start-up with a friend which eventually went sour and I was looking for any work to give me some income. I explained the situation to my mentor at the time and the next morning I had an interview at a local Voice over IP service provider. After a few years at that engagement solving interesting and very large scale problems I moved into the open source community and here I am today.

What are you hoping to get out of TADHack?

TADHack is very exciting because it brings together the flourishing telecommunications community under one umbrella. I look forward to encouraging open source contributions and innovation as well as the opportunity of networking with colleagues. Finally, the prize money is a great incentive for teams to get involved and get paid for having fun.