ClueCon 2024 marked 20 years of the annual developers conference! This year, we celebrated two decades of innovation and technology with the FreeSWITCH community in the heart of downtown Chicago. Attendees joined us from around the globe as we took this opportunity to look back on the first ClueCon, which led to the founding of FreeSWITCH itself - an incredible milestone in the world of telecom.

Throughout the week, we heard some great talks from many familiar faces from around the community of open source and telecom. Each day brought fresh insights and new ideas, especially around hot topics like AI. If you missed out, don’t worry - all the presentations will all be available soon on the FreeSWITCH YouTube channel, so be sure you’re subscribed.

A few other notable events took place during the week, some of which will also make an appearance on the channel very soon. You’ll find a recap of a few highlights below.

FreeSWITCH v1.10.12 Release!

We kicked the week off with a FreeSWITCH Release! This is a minor release containing important bug fixes, stability improvements and added ARM64 support. Debian 10 Buster and CentOS support have been dropped. If you haven’t yet, update as soon as possible!

The Coder Games

Our annual hack-a-thon offered a fun and engaging networking event as attendees arrived for the week. We had some coding challenges available for those who wanted to flex their skills, and non-coding challenges for anyone who wanted a break from their keyboards.

Maker Challenge

This year's Maker Challenge was a battle royale of epic proportions where we challenged attendees to build cars for a high-stakes balloon-popping showdown. The last battle car standing with its balloon still intact was named the winner!

FreeCYCLED Hacks

For the FreeCYCLED Hacks challenge, we built Rube Goldberg Machines using only household items! The goal? The machine had to successfully hang up a phone that was playing a VERY annoying song. Some contraptions had a harder time sticking the landing than others.

The SignalWire Challenge

Participants in the SignalWire Challenge put SignalWire’s AI Agent to the test with demos of their own using SignalWire's AI technology. In the end, the first place prize was awarded to an AI calendar demo, where calling the AI agent and speaking on the phone allows you to schedule and cancel meetings on a Google Calendar. We have a guide available for this very practical use case if you want to try it yourself!

Dinner at Giordano's

We ended day one of ClueCon 2024 with networking, fun, and a classic Chicago meal where everyone got settled! Everyone relaxed and rested up for the week ahead with pizza, drinks, and great company.

The AI Roundtable

Evan McGee moderated this year’s AI roundtable, joined by James Tagg, Jeff Pulver, Diego Gosmar, Kristian Kielhofner, and Anthony Minessale. They had a discussion about current artificial intelligence use cases across industries, how they're working with AI, and where they predict it will go in the future. More details coming soon!

The FreeSWITCH Roundtable

Our second roundtable for the year was a FreeSWITCH roundtable hosted by Luca Pradovera! The founders and core developers of the FreeSWITCH project, Jakub Karolczyk, Chris Rienzo, Michael Jerris, Brian West, and Anthony Minessale discussed how FreeSWITCH helped shape telecom and where they envision the industry going next.

Gigabit Reception

We celebrated our annual Gigabit Reception with a 20th ClueCon anniversary party! Attendees enjoyed a 20th anniversary cake, belted out their favorite songs at karaoke, and enjoyed some games, drinks, and networking together while we reflected on the last 2 decades of work that went into the open-source project.

Casino Night

We brought back an annual favorite for this year's conference! This event included the Poker Tournament, hosted by World Poker Tour Champion Phil Gordon. Attendees enjoyed drinks, snacks, casino games, and competed for an array of prizes.

Dangerous Demos

We ended the conference day with Dangerous Demos, where the demos had to get dangerous in 3 minutes or less. After a few successful runs and a few demos that crashed and burned, four crystal Dangerous Demos trophies were given out. And James Body called in remotely to participate in deciding the winners!

The Grand Prize Giveaway

The Grand Prize giveaway marked the end of the conference! If you want your own, you'll just have to attend next year... (save the date for August 4th-7th, 2025!)

We’re already looking forward to what the next decade will bring and can’t wait to see everyone again at ClueCon 2025. Here’s to the next 20 years of connecting, collaborating, and creating the future of communication! Subscribe to the FreeSWITCH newsletter to make sure you don’t miss out on the Early Bird Special and other ClueCon updates.