When Company Culture Fights COVID-19: Life At OutSystems
By: Ricardo Coimbra Neto
Tags: Company Culture, Community, Covid 19, Low Code, App Development

When the pandemic hit, OutSystems employees were sent home. There’s only so much one can do in times like these. But during quarantine, I felt the need to understand what I could do to help out. Yes, I had to work from home, but did that have to mean I couldn’t help? Not quite.

So as I was casually catching up on my Slack messages when I stumbled upon a message from my co-worker and friend João Neves. He said: “Hey guys, I’m joining ProjectOpenAir to check if there are things I can help with!” I asked him for an invite to Slack, and in minutes, I was in a channel where more than three thousand people were coming up with ideas that spanned from 3D printing medical equipment to apps that would help families understand how to keep children occupied during these days.

A lot was going on, so I had to focus.

Sorting Through Ideas

At first, I had the feeling that everything was a bit disorganized! Too many people talking in too many channels, some of them investing effort in things others were already invested in. Focusing on software development, I scanned through all the ideas. I came up with something I thought seemed meaningful: hospitals needing help troubleshooting and fixing damaged ventilators.

Some hours later, there I was with a group of strangers designing a new system with the following goals: to allow hospitals to communicate problems with ventilators and have specialists in the field helping to solve them. We had our first call the next day, and we realized people with different responsibilities were interested — for example, hospital administrative personnel and surgeons I knew we were on to something!

The next day OutSystems announced the COVID-19 OutSystems Community Emergency Response providing a place for people to post ideas. Based on their value, there would be tools and people to get it done.

This was excellent news. First, we could submit the idea and, if it got approved, we would have an enterprise-grade infrastructure to work on for free for the duration of the pandemic. And, second, it showed me that I, João and OutSystems were perfectly aligned with the culture we are used to seeing at work. In this time of need, our golden rules lived outside the office as well: be helpful, be accountable and whatever you do, try to do it great. We submitted the idea and it got approved!

The process of evaluating and approving an idea proved to be quite simple! People that want to help head to the OutSystems Community Emergency Response site and propose the idea describing it in a way that others can comment on, vote, or join! Afterward, ideas are evaluated, considering their impact potential, as well as their feasibility. Then, accepted ideas are announced. So we submitted our own idea, and it got approved! This not only allowed us to use the infrastructure, but it gave visibility to the rest of the OutSystems Community, making us benefit from all the help they could provide.

Developing the Idea

We started having calls with the team, and the usual roles in a project began to emerge. We were responsible for translating requirements into a healthy architecture and implementing them. A Trello board was used to organize work, design decisions done over a document, and communication happening day and night over Slack.

I’m an R&D Engineering Manager at OutSystems in one of Platform Core teams. This means I’m usually surrounded by low-level code to develop OutSystems rather than develop with OutSystems. At first, I felt a bit uncomfortable realizing my inexperience with my own product, but after a short period of time, I must say that the speed at which I was able to tackle task after task really made me feel productive! As soon as we started showing progress people were really impressed by the number of things that were already done in about two days of development. There was one call that while people were discussing some requirement changes, I did the change, published the app, and said: “There you go, it’s done!” Immediate silence for three seconds!

After a couple of nights (and dawns), we concluded we were going to need backup! Saturday, March 20, at lunchtime, we slacked an internal OutSystems COVID-19 community Slack channel asking for help. In only a couple of minutes, developers were looking at the app, its requirements, and figuring out how they could help. It was very easy for them to understand what we had done, and how they could start contributing as soon as possible. This only happened because navigating low-code is more readable than traditional code.

From that lunchtime until Sunday late at night, an amazing group of people joined forces and came up with vent2life! 22 volunteers with different backgrounds, different companies, using their own personal time away from their families to make a difference in the troubled times we are all going through.

Seeing the Idea Come to Life

About a week after this thing started, vent2life was announced! Our next big milestone is having the first ventilator being fixed through the application!

These are some strange days we are going through. We live with technology all around us, but that doesn’t prevent a minuscule silent agent from changing the way we live. Lucky for us, we have one thing much more powerful than technology: humanity.

So, if you’re reading this, spread the word! Even the wealthiest countries in the world are struggling. The number of available ventilators to cope with this pandemic is simply not enough. vent2life might be a great way to increase the number of working equipment!