MxHacks Diamond Sponsor Spotlight: AWS Powers Innovation at Scale

AWS x MX Hacks Promo Flyer

Our very first ‘MxHacks: Low-Code for Good’ Hackathon was a blast! On September 23rd and 24th, more than 1200 of the best and brightest developers around the world competed in Mendix’s global hackathon and used Mendix’s low-code Platform to create apps that improve lives. We’re proud that Amazon Web Services (AWS) joined us as our global Diamond sponsor and competed in the hackathon at our Rotterdam office.

AWS and Mendix

A formal introduction of AWS feels a bit superfluous because many already know it’s the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering more than 200 fully featured services from data centers globally used by millions of customers. AWS helps companies lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster at scale.

AWS has a longstanding collaborative partnership with Mendix. The collaboration goes back to 2015, and Mendix Cloud has run on AWS since 2016. Earlier this year, the partnership was extended with intelligent automation solutions. “Innovation is in our shared DNA and I couldn’t be more proud to have worked with AWS for this global hackathon”, says Mendix CEO Tim Srock. “During the event, the AWS team has leveraged the transformative powers of the Mendix platform and AWS’ solutions and knowledge to empower all attendees to build innovative solutions that are going to make a difference in the daily lives of vulnerable people.”

AWS at MxHacks

During MxHacks, AWS hosted workshops and organized an AWS challenge. All participants were provided access to the 200+ AWS services that they used to build features and integrations into their applications. Experts of AWS were on the ground to coach developers during the hackathon.

As a part of the AWS Challenge, the developer community combined  the speed of low-code development and the power of cloud for good cause and created modern applications with powerful features such as voice, chat, AI-driven personalization, and translations – to name a few.

We would like to congratulate the winning teams of the AWS challenge:

  1. The DreamTeam (Wouter Vijverberg, Tim Verlinde)  incorporated Amazon AI services to provide capabilities for Translations, Speech-to-Text, and Image recognition to the Welcome App.
  2. Appronto Team (Pim Van Der Noll, John Cornegge, Axel Trip) created a re-usable module that allows developers to quickly assemble microflows with any AWS service using REST APIs and integrated AI-based features for speech.
  3. Springer Nature Team (Ruslan Dil, Aleksandra Larina) built a functionality and a widget for Amazon S3 that allows uploading and using files of any sizes into an application based on a common request from the Mendix forum.

The judges were impressed with the results delivered in such a short time. The Mendix Development team is in the process of incorporating community-built features into the AWS connectors and releasing them on the Mendix Marketplace. It showcases how the community can participate in co-creation projects and drive innovation!