A summary of ONE Conference 2024

Last week I attended OutSystems ONE Conference in Amsterdam. Monday guiding a champion to the training session, telling the Community team to work faster on the swag pick up, checking up who was arriving on time and checking-in for the ones arriving late. Tuesday doing the full event and party. Wednesday a full event and saying goodbye to most of the colleagues, mentees and friends. And Friday the very important MVP Summit – right next to Champions Summit, Partners Summit and all parallel smaller events – where we got a sneak-peek of what you will discover next year.

Where are the key points that you need to know:

NEO lives!

OutSystems made this event the best in history, with a simple trick: bringing Neo to the party. We have been seeing Neo for years now, and we love that creature. The ads where Neo finally speaks were strange because no one imagined the voice like that, but seeing that fluffy thing wandering around, made everyone’s day.

What can we learn from Neo? Basically everything. Neo was always available for photos, for hugs, with a friendly wave to everyone in the distance and treating each person at the conference as a long-time friend. That is what community means, at least at OutSystems. So, if you want to be the beloved mascot of the company, just do that.

“Mentor” is the word

Apart from that, OutSystems launched a new product. The eagerly expected Project Morpheus is now OutSystems Mentor (not what I am, and not AI Mentor Studio, just Mentor) and it is speeding the development from months to minutes, like the 100x vision announced last year. Let me just add that it will not be a 100 times faster for the full project, but I can honestly tell you that after requirements are written, the first 60 or 80% of the implementation can be done in 5 minutes, leaving you the usual 6x speed for the remaining 40% in the most disruptive scenario.

Ground-breaking? You haven’t seen the best of it, as this is the first shared version, so it can only grow better.

At start I was scared for my future students as the “easy part” of development is being taken from them, but they can still do it, see it well done for reference, or just turn it off and do it the old-fashioned way. And they will always have the plain old human mentors to guide them.

We are truly better

I’m not comparing OutSystems with any competitor, because that is pointless. Others may try very hard to reach OutSystems, but nothing is years close to the speed, security, and scalability OutSystems is offering today.

The “better” here applies to the community. Once again, Sne challenged us to build a brighter future and the community answered massively. From seasoned MVPs to the newest students, more than 300 developers with all kinds of profiles accepted the challenge. Some of the key topics were health, environment, women and animals.

This time I didn’t participate in one team, but my “little ones” – like I affectionately refer to them – distributed by four teams, had a great performance. Last year my team got fourth place, this year my best placed team won the AWS Award. It is worth noticing that no two people on the team work at the same company, and none of them work with AWS AI daily. This victory was all a product of their herculean effort in one week. They mastered multiple AWS AI Services, the brand new ODC Workflows, as well as our old friend ODC.

And if last year they decided to award the top 6 with a license so they could continue their work – and we did, certifying a lot of women in ODC and creating Forge Components including one with almost 100 downloads – this year OutSystems did even better. Instead of awarding the top 6, any team that wants to keep the project development will have access to an ODC environment.

OutSystems is a force for good and the community in general is incredible. It is a privilege to be a part of this.

Neo Awards recognize the most influential

Hackathon teams, Clients and Partners get their own awards. The Community has a special thing: the Neo Awards. It recognizes the most impactful and sometimes invisible members. Because this year there was only one event for the world, it included the awards for all 3 regions.

I’ve been a not very effective online influencer, but managed to create quite some impact in my geographical area. In 2021 I was a co-organizer for Portugal User Groups and we got the “Most User Groups Organized”. In 2023 I repeated that one alone (with the spiritual presence of Olga Duarte) and added to it the new “Social Responsibility”, making me one of only two people with 3 Neo Awards. This year I won again and became the first and only individual to reach the 4 awards.

The best part was that our neighbor Miguel Antunes also repeated his usual victory in the Forge contribution section – making Porto the only city in the world with two Neo Awards 2024 – and our regular visitor Helena Lameiro won Most User Groups Participations. Porto is the place where you breathe OutSystems every day and we even managed to have a pretty good presence at the very end of the event for the group photo.

Decoded Live

The amazing duo of Decoded did a Live experiment so that everyone at home could get a part of ONE. From about 10 hours split in two days, Youtube/LinkedIn broadcasted interviews happening live at the conference.

They interviewed OutSystems staff, conference speakers, MVPs, Champions, and people that went home with hackathon and Neo awards. I was one of them and the very last before Paulo Rosado closed the program. My time was cut short because of time limitations, but I got a rain-check to do the missing 5 minutes later, so prepare to hear me talk a bit more.

I have to say that the program ran as smoothly as possible and they followed all my indications as a movie/video content producer so there is nothing I can complain about. Kudos also to Sahiba for all the work juggling and tracking the guests. She was just amazing.

About the guests, I can say Andreia Tulcidas was perfect in yet another role. This is the third podcast where I heard her this year and it was the best so far. Helena Lameiro was great advertising our newest User Group in Leiria, Ana Bandarra Baptista (one of my “little ones”) said a great amount of complements on me, and the legendary Stefan Weber was also complementing me just before my segment. But you should really hear the full 10 hours as the others are also fine speakers and have a lot to say.

Some short news to end this

• A free test environment for ODC (look for the new banner in ODC courses) is already available.
• OutSystems Mentor is on Early Access and you can apply to join.
• The Champions program is accepting registrations.
• ODC Migration tool is rolling out with new features and higher capabilities every couple of months.

Anything else you want to know, you can talk to us. As a fully certified OutSystems developer, OutSystems Pre-Sales, OutSystems MVP, OutSystems Trainer, OutSystems Recruiter, a few other things and a very appreciated mentor, I have the answers you need. (Ana said on the podcast I was very humble so I have extra bragging rights this month)

Be it about adopting OS, recruiting a new team, training your current team, developing or auditing your Traditional/Reactive/ODC factory, a mix of them, a migration for now or later, this is the company you are looking for.