Kevin P. Fleming

Kevin P. Fleming has been programming computers for over two decades in every major programming language, and many minor ones. He has worked in fields such as traditional client/server database applications, open source messaging and networking, mainframe operating system and warehouse automation. Kevin’s primary skills are problem analysis and solution design, and producing optimal solutions that use resources efficiently and effectively.

Kevin has been an active member of the worldwide open source community for over five years, and has made contributions to many projects, including the Linux kernel, the Exim SMTP MTA and the OpenVPN network tunneling package. He fervently believes that open source software is the ‘right’ way to do things and strives to use open source solutions whenever possible.

In the summer of 2004, Kevin and a partner started a small VoIP ITSP operation in Phoenix, Arizona and chose Asterisk as their platform for switching and hosted PBX services. During the next few months, they dealt with many issues in Asterisk that required modification of the source code, and Kevin posted those patches for Digium to merge into the main Asterisk source tree. As time progressed, the number of patches and changes increased dramatically, to the point where there were 8-10 new patches every week.

In February of 2005, Mark Spencer invited Kevin (and other members of the Asterisk community) to join Digium at Spring VON 2005 in San Jose, California. At this event Kevin met Mark for the first time, along with a number of other Digium employees and a few of the other major Asterisk contributors. He also spent a great deal of time in the Digium/Asterisk booth helping to explain Asterisk to the show attendees and learning how other users were using Asterisk in their networks.

Soon after returning from the show, Mark contacted Kevin to see if he would be interested in joining Digium’s team to work on Asterisk full-time; a trip was arranged to Huntsville for early April so that he could meet the rest of the team, work in the Digium office for a few days and spend some time learning about the city. Before the trip was over, Mark had already made him and offer, and it was accepted.

In June of 2005, Kevin became a full time employee of Digium, and began managing the ‘bug tracker’ and the community interaction related to it.

Over the remainder of the year, the amount of work involved increased substantially as the Asterisk community continued to grow and more users became contributors to the open source project. At Astricon 2005, Mark officially announced that Kevin is the ‘co-maintainer’ of the Asterisk development tree (along with Mark himself).