Where everything started. 6 months after my first contact with apps, I decided to join this hackathon. I was pursuing my degree at that time, and thought it’d be beneficial to increase my exposure to the corporate world in ways the university couldn’t already help me with. A few days later, I stumbled upon an ad on LinkedIn. The rest is history.
Back in 2020, Huawei was starting to market their Huawei Mobile Services APIs among students as part of an expansion strategy in Europe. Parallely, they launched the Huawei Student Developers and Huawei Developer Groups to compete against Google’s. Turns out, I was caught in the eye of the storm.
There were 180 Spanish students in that hackathon, which took place online. The only requirement was to implement one or more HMS capabilities, and then a jury would decide on three winners.
I recently had visited my grandmother a few weeks before the competition, and I realised her way of keeping track of her medications was as unique as it was dangerous: marking shapes and colors on her calendar. We had gifted her a smartphone some months before the visit, so the dots connected almost instantly: I was going to create the first pill reminder for specially designed for senior citizens.
Since I was in the middle of my exams season, I only had 2 weeks to prototype an app, instead of the 3 they gave us. After a wild ride designing, dealing with Huawei’s documentation (a true maze), and breaking the whole app an hour before the deadline, I managed to submit it on time.
With this win, I gained the confidence to continue the development of Clover and turning it into what was going to become my biggest, most successful project to date.