Since I was an adolescent I have been interested in scientific subjects. I’ve always been in contact with the newest technology and I used to study a lot with my computer. When I decided to start my career as a Computer Science student, I was a stranger in the coding world. The 1st year was so difficult, cause I’ve approached with something completely new to me. We started learning Python, which was a simple language but we were unable to apply outside our course. Obviously it was normal, but I was not so mature to understand it. I really underestimated the coding world. There where also other scientific subjects more theoretical, to give us a broad base of knowledge. At the end of the year I was about to leave, but fortunately my parents encouraged me to continue. The following year I started appreciated what I was studying, I learned C and Java languages, and we started studying Algorithms and Software Engineering. At the start of the 3rd year, I growth good skills but had no concrete experience to test our capabilities. I was unfulfilled.

Therefore, the turning point.

Thanks to an extra academic workshop (Google Technologies for the Web) proposed by one teacher, me and my classmates decided to start our first real developing project. We are developing a mobile-app on Android called Parkidle. This app is about to solve the problem of finding an empty parking spot. For the first time we where searching to give a solution to a real problem with our coding skills. The participation to that workshop included some preliminary meeting about the best practices for team-working. Then every month each team has to show it’s progress during the period, preparing a pdf presentation and exposing to all. We have a jury made of teachers, who give points according to the work done. After 4 month and 4 presentations, there will be a winner team who will have the chance to show its idea at Google Tel Aviv. Right now we are near the 3rd Milestone presentation, we are the second team in the ranking with 35 points (1st has 36), so we can made it.

I don’t know if Parkidle will win this contest but surely this was a great experience.

Furthermore, during this workshop, the same teacher proposed to us and other teams to partecipate at Sapienza Incubation Programme (another extra-academic project about startup incubators). We decided to ask for the participation to it, and we have been taken. This program is about 6 meetings of 4 hours about the best strategies to accelerate your startup, 2 checkpoints which consists in “ideas presentation” and finally a Final Event with a great audience. Oh, I forgot to say: this was in collaboration with Luiss Enlabs Group, which is the most important Startup Accelerato Group in Rome, and they have a 100% launch rate of the startups who work with them. Right now we just ended the 6 meetings expected and we are preparing an elevator pitch to present at the first checkpoint on 04/04/2018. Thanks to this program we learned about the best business strategies to launch a startup. We also
we have also added two new people into the team, cause we needed someone to manage the business/economic side of our project (we were only 4 Computer Science student). So now we are 6 people working together to get our idea launched.

On the 18/03/2018 (3 months since the day one) we have an Android mobile-app published as Beta Version on Google Play Store. We have something like 120 download, but not too much active user to see our idea working. We also have a website and also social profiles on Instagram and Facebook.

In the end, I’ve to say that in the last 4-5 months I’ve learned a lot of new things thanks to the project we started which let us to face problems more directly and to find solutions to them.

Thanks for the attention, I hope you enjoyed my 1st one.