Asterisk was amazing fun, in one place we had it hooked up to a big chunk of Python -- everything driven by a program connected to the manager API, with events

Asterisk was amazing fun, in one place we had it hooked up to a big chunk of Python -- everything driven by a program connected to the manager API, with events percolating through to a pre-websocket, pre-AJAX ColdFusion app (we used long polling, I think) that put up a popup with the customer's info as your extension rang. The preferred extension to ring was pulled out of the customer's call history, so they'd always get the same agent if possible. For another customer it was a similar deal, only this time it was to glue an old school call center PBX system to Asterisk for reasons I can no longer remember. The PBX had its own management interface, so again a Python app connected to both interfaces and figured out call identities on both sides, which were dumped into a MySQL database for (I think) the web app used by the call center staff. I talked to those guys a few years later and it was all still running. He told me it reliably hung once a week but he never bothered to report it because a shell script automatically restarted it in that case. Resourceful sysadmins! Good times