Building an AI-Powered Agriculture Platform for Olela

Problem

Olela set out to give small-scale farmers a platform that could combine practical farm-management tools with AI-driven insight — built fast enough to demo within a hackathon timeline (Lispa Hack 2024).

My role

I built the backend: the REST APIs that power the platform’s core features and the integration layer connecting them to AI services for generating insights from farm data.

How I approached it

With a hard hackathon deadline, the priority was a backend that was simple to extend under time pressure — clear API boundaries so the frontend and AI integration could move in parallel without blocking each other.

Outcome

The team shipped a working platform demonstrating AI-assisted agriculture within the hackathon window — one of two Lispa Hack challenges I’ve since competed in.

What I’d do differently

Write integration tests for the AI layer earlier — most of the late debugging came from edge cases in the AI responses that tests would have caught sooner.