Yesterday, I joined Appfarm's Developalooza, together with some other members of our team. For those of us who work with Appfarm Create, this is the one event a year where we get pulled away from our desks to see where the platform is actually heading. A few things from the product updates stuck with me.
Semantic search and the new agent action node stood out the most to me, probably because of what they'll change about how we build customer applications. Right now, introducing these kinds of features into a customer app means wiring up an integration to an external service and letting it handle vectorization (hello, Azure). When this functionality moves into Appfarm Create directly, we skip the extra setup, an additional license, and an explanation to whoever inherits the project about why half the logic lives somewhere else.
Then there were the new logs. Nobody outside of software development will ever get why we'd get excited about Appfarm opening up what we have long described as the black box. Years of cobbling together our own logging and debugging tools will do that to a person. It felt less like a product update and more like group therapy.
Also spotted in a panel discussion: Andreas Sjölund, CRO at Omnium – another one of Novacare's partners. The world is small.
The customer case that I was genuinely thrilled to see was the one presented by Ingvild Bergseth and Line Smedsrud from NAV Ringsaker. RingsakerKompasset is a platform built to support refugee integration work. Small in scale for now, created by two people (with some support from Appfarm developers) determined to make something work inside a system that isn't exactly known for moving fast. It's easy to be critical of digitalization in the public sector, but in this case I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that this gets picked up by NAV centrally. Social entrepreneurship at its best.
It's easy to measure a conference by its keynotes, but for me yesterday was about the small stuff: less setup, more insight into the platform, a reminder that you don't always need a large team and a huge budget to drive innovation and deliver value.