Sleepless nights, endless debugging sessions and litres of caffeine. For Owen Corstens, who works for Harmony as a developer at Cordaan, the OutSystems Build for the Future Hackathon 2024 was an intensive dive into the world of AI application development. Together with former colleague Nash, he built an innovative healthcare application in seven days. "It was exhausting, but worth every minute."
From theory to practice
"AI is often still theoretical," says Owen, a little tired but above all very enthusiastic. "You read about it, you take training courses, but in the end you learn the most by simply getting to work with it." He got that chance at the biggest OutSystems hackathon ever, which brought together 330 developers from 17 countries.
During the day, Owen worked on his regular project at Cordaan; in the evenings he dived into the hackathon. "They were intense days. Sometimes I was coding until two in the morning, only to get up a few hours later for my day job. But it gave me so much energy to see how quickly we were making progress."
Technical depth
The technical challenges were substantial. "We really got the most out of OutSystems and the available AI services," Owen explains. He lists them: "Azure Functions for image processing, Amazon Rekognition for facial recognition, MediaPipe Pose for body detection. We even built our own AI Agent with the OutSystems AI Agent Builder."
The team used ODC Forge components to speed up development, and implemented an event-driven architecture for real-time processing. "One of the coolest features is how we integrated speech recognition," says Owen. "Care professionals can control the app with voice commands, which is crucial when your hands are full with patient care."
Lessons in AI integration
The hackathon was a great learning experience. "I learned an enormous amount about implementing AI in practice," Owen reflects. "For example, how you can combine different AI services for better results. Or how you can use machine learning for preventive checks in healthcare."
An important insight was the balance between innovation and usability. "You can add all the AI bells and whistles, but in the end it has to be workable for the end user," says Owen. "Our experience at Cordaan helped enormously in making those trade-offs."
Future prospects for Harmony
For Harmony, Owen's participation means more than just a hackathon experience. "I'm taking this knowledge into future projects," he says. "We now have a blueprint for integrating different AI technologies into OutSystems applications. That is incredibly valuable for our clients."
The technical stack the team used can be applied directly in other projects:
- AI Agent Builder for creating custom AI agents
- Azure Cognitive Services for speech and text processing
- AWS services for advanced image recognition
- OutSystems ODC for fast, scalable application development
"We've proved that you can build very advanced AI applications with OutSystems," says Owen. "That opens doors for future innovation at all our clients."
Judging is still under way
While the judging is still in full swing, Owen stays level-headed. "Of course it would be great to win, but that wasn't the point," he says. The jury, with experts from Microsoft and AWS, is assessing the entries on technical innovation (50% for AI applications), development efficiency (35%) and user interface (15%).
"We built something we're proud of, and learned an incredible amount along the way. That knowledge is worth far more to Harmony than any prize."
A new phase for healthcare innovation
For Owen, the hackathon marks a new phase in his development as a developer. "I'm now much more confident about implementing AI in our projects," he says. "We can offer clients like Cordaan even better solutions, based on real experience with these technologies."
His advice for other developers? "Dare to experiment. Yes, it takes time and energy, but the knowledge you gain is priceless. And with platforms like OutSystems you can get from idea to working application faster than ever before."
