Won Product Innovation at HackTM last weekend. This is what a week of that looks like up close.

The idea

It started with a conversation with an AI. I was exploring random EU regulation rabbit holes and stumbled onto EHDS — the European Health Data Space — a framework that’s going to force healthcare organizations across the EU to rethink how they handle patient data, cross-border sharing, and compliance. The more I read, the more obvious it became that most of these organizations have no structured way to deal with it.

That became the project. With Cortojan Alexandru, Popa Patrick, and Ciucur Erol, we built a legal compliance tool targeting exactly that gap.

Except we didn’t build that on day one. Monday through Wednesday we spent just trying to understand the problem — who actually owns this, what the regulation requires in practice, what a solution even looks like. The business angle shifted, the target market changed, and the architecture changed with it. By the time we were actually building, we had maybe half the week left.

You can take a look at the GitHub Repo here: https://github.com/Albert-4096/EHDS-Service

The pitch that almost didn’t happen

Pitch day was the most stressful part by a distance.

We had last-minute changes to the product, no finalized presentation, and a slot coming up fast. At some point it became clear we weren’t going to have slides in time through normal means — so I spun up an HTML presentation with an embedded video, deployed it on my server with Docker and nginx in under five minutes, and that’s what we pitched with.

It worked. Dragoș Argint had helped us shape the delivery in the days before, which probably saved us when things got chaotic. The judges responded well. We won Product Innovation.

The week itself

This was my first hackathon. I didn’t know what to expect and I’m not sure I could have.

Ten espressos. Over 40 hours without sleep at one point. Aumovio brought a bow-shooting area to the venue, which is not something I anticipated doing mid-hackathon. Met international students from UPT. Had real conversations with people from the industry who actually wanted to talk about the work.

The networking was the part I underestimated most. I came in focused on building. I left thinking about the conversations.

People worth mentioning

Furnica Andreea (Aumovio) — the first mentor who got genuinely excited about the project. She explained how internal initiatives actually get built and managed inside a company. We left that conversation with a different roadmap.

Andrei Son (Aumovio) — came at us from the business side and found the holes in our thinking before the judges did.

Radu Moldovan — brought real depth on IT and Big Data infrastructure. We needed it.

Ciprian Lucaci — showed me what it looks like to use AI tools at full throttle. Still thinking about that one.

Dragoș Argint — helped us shape the pitch. It made a difference on stage.

Dan Bugariu — ran the whole event together with the BanatIT & HackTM Team, and I also got a chance to sit down with him and chat. Great experience.

I’m a 12th-grade student. This is what I do with my weekends.

More to come.