Hi, It’s me Fred
My name is Fred Muteesa, I am a husband and a father of 4. I am originally from Uganda but currently based in the UK (more on this later).
I am defined by a lot of hobbies. I have been part of the open-source community for quite some years now. In the past, I have played with both Asterisk and Freeswitch. If you are a YouTube lover, I have a mini FreeSWITCH video series titled FreeSWITCH with Fred which I produced during my time at FreeSWITCH.
Another hobby I have is singing and dancing and of course socialising if that qualifies as a hobby. My music is on all music platforms, if that interests you, you can check Papa Muteesa on any music platform starting here.
In my tech career I have worked with open source VoIP, building PBXs, troubleshooting, scripting, SIP Trunking, VoIP anti-fraud, and built and broken a few things based on the common IT support ideology which goes by; “Turn it off then Turn it back on 😉 ” I have gradually grown in my carrier as a self taught researcher. I became curious about VoIP and the open source community around 2015. I was given the task of maintaining a VoIP platform in Uganda which was built on top of Asterisk with ss7 interconnects. This was the beginning of my journey Into VoIP; using Google, Stack Overflow, and a few community forums just to find answers.
Those were tough days without chatgpt and AI to help with the searches. The open source communities came in handy. I innovated a few products for Liquid Telecom at the time where I worked as a VoIP Core Network Engineer for Liquid Telecom Group. I contributed to designing and building anti-fraud platforms to arrest issues with Simbox Fraud and Call Refiling. It’s at that time when the business needs grew that I learnt about FreeSWITCH. This triggered my interest in the Community and I decided to attend the ClueCon conference in Chicago. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise. I got to meet Anthony Minessale, the founder of FreeSWITCH who gave me the opportunity to visualise his FreeSWITCH book and turn it into mini Videos (FreeSWITCH with Fred). At that Conference in 2017 I also got to meet Simon Woodhead. We met at a bowling game in Chicago. I mistakenly made him miss his turn during the game and he almost killed me 😉 From that time, we kept in touch and after almost 8 years, here we are working together.
Earlier, I mentioned that I’m based in the UK but originally from Uganda. This big move was made possible thanks to Simwood who hired me as a consultant last year. I worked remotely for 1 year while I was in Uganda, until that time when I expressed my interest to move. Simwood fully sponsored my relocation and helped me move my entire family to the UK. It was a very big move with all the nitty-gritty involved. From Visa applications, to flights—and Simwood ensured that we are well settled. To help us settle in well Simwood has hired my partner as well and Agnes will be joining the Porting Team (this came as very exciting news and I am sure at some point she will share her side of the story). She has been offered flexible hours to help her double between parenting and growing her career. At Simwood I am working as a Level 3 Support Engineer. It’s been an awesome experience.
Trust me when I say this, I fell in love with the Simwood team when I visited their offices in Bristol last year. There is so much I could say about the company but a few things stood out from the very beginning. The transparency and respect within the company at all levels won me over. Simon, our CEO, regularly updates the entire team on what’s happening in the executive kitchen, and I can tell you that he genuinely has the employees’ interests at heart. The proof of this is that for the first time in my career, I have been granted growth shares in a company I work for. That’s right – Simwood shareholders surrendered some of their shares and divided them among all staff members. Amazing, isn’t it?
Now you are asking yourself, how does one get hired at Simwood; well inbox us on LinkedIn we can have a chat.
In my role at Simwood, I am responsible for ensuring our customers are happy and using our services efficiently and with ease. I diagnose issues escalated by both Level 1 and Level 2 support teams, acting as the bridge between the support team and the development and DevOps teams. It’s an exciting role because I get to learn from both customers and developers, which means I’m fully aware of what the Simwood devs are cooking up.
I have been given all the tools required to perform my job with utmost efficiency. I have access to the backend code of our platforms, hence I can dive in and challenge myself in trying to find and attempt to fix some bugs. Within the jurisdiction of their teams, the managers and team leads are quite knowledgeable and there is no chance that they would give you unrealistic timelines because they have been there, done it all. Everyone here gets their hands ‘dirty’ to achieve a common goal.
Charles our CTO is like a ‘knowledge machine’ – he knows the ins and outs of all code repositories and in a snap of a finger, he can guide you to an answer. At Simwood, knowledge is shared freely with everyone who wants to learn. There is room for growth and hard work is appreciated and fully rewarded. Recently, my colleague Jakob was promoted from Level 2 to Level 3 and now is the support team lead. I have witnessed this and it’s not very common in other workplaces, trust me. We have a monthly reward for the best performer. By the way, the reward is not just a potato, it’s a paycheck. 😉
I will be travelling back to Africa Next week, specifically down in Kenya – Nairobi – where I will be representing Simwood at the ITW Africa conference. I am looking forward to meeting all the big players in the telecoms industry. Simwood is always present at most of the social events, so let’s have a chat..
