--Originally published at Social coding
So what did I do? What will I be doing? What have I been working in?
This time I will tell you a story and a little bit more, check out the video at the end!
I always wanted to make projects and the first one I tried in programming was a calculator for mass in the body, it also had some tips from nutritionists. But I didn’t finished, I always wanted to put it on the web but I didn’t have the time. Now I have learned that if I want to do something, there is no excuses I should just do it and then think about the sacrifices.
I have been working in the last months in an app and a web app. It was a solution for the problems of parking meter systems, we wanted to attacked one of the main problems of our country, corruption. We began at a Hackaton called “Social hacking”, it was at Tec de Monterrey. There is a good story that I can say now, that day we sold smoke.
Everyone knows the story behind Dropbox when it was showed to some group of venture investors, I had a inspiration from it. We were working hard to make the Twilio api work, and also integrating it with a database and running the web app on Ruby but it was hard for us to do it in 48 hours. Also we were very inexperienced (now maybe more less) so we were panicked. Then 15 minutes before the presentation in front of the judges, I got an idea.
We could trick them and make them believe in what we wanted to do but couldn’t make it.
So we used an app called “IFTTT” now called only “IF”, the app works with triggers on your apps or accounts, and then it does a instruction that you give it. I made this:
Then in the presentation, we gave them a number (supposed to be of the app, but it was mine). And they send the text message to park their vehicle. They were amazed it worked, only one was being suspicious but it didn’t affected. We won the first place, got some Dell tablets and it was the begin of a great journey of learning and luck.
Then we began having luck because the government of Zapopan wanted the project to continue and began working with them. They come to the ITESM and asked if they can provide us help to do it. Then we joined TecLean, which is an accelerator for Startups. We began learning about management and also business.
Then the Smart Cities Hackathon arrived, it was the first international convention about Smart Cities from the IEEE members. We won there but not in a way we would like to, we won the “People’s choice award”. We got some money and showed the project to all the IEEE fellows who were there.
Now, after all that. Some members lose motivation or didn’t have enough time so we decided to pause the project. But here is a video of the app and also one from the concept:
Now I need to see to the future, I will be doing with my partners a game. We don’t have something decided, but I am totally sure that it will be fun. Also I am looking forward to begin a new project, it was a great experience that I will not forget.