Redemption Arc: GardaChain at Huawei APAC 2025
They say some of the best engineering happens under a deadline. For us, it happened in a single week.
Fresh off a “heartbreaking” Top 5 finish at a national hackathon, my teammates, Bagus Raka, Moh Rizky Arif, and I decided we weren’t done yet. With only seven days left before the deadline for the Huawei Developer Competition 2025 Asia Pacific, we decided to go all in.
Redesigning GardaChain
We took every bit of feedback we had received and performed a massive overhaul of GardaChain. This wasn’t just a UI polish; we pushed major architectural improvements to the platform, focusing on how it could leverage Huawei Cloud’s ecosystem to provide even more robust decentralized transparency.
The “crunch” was intense, but the vision was clear: we wanted to take GardaChain from a national finalist to an international winner.
From Jakarta to Hong Kong
Our efforts paid off. We were selected as regional finalists and invited to pitch our solution at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (HK PolyU).
Standing on that stage in Hong Kong felt different. We had refined the pitch, battle-tested the code, and knew exactly where GardaChain fit in the future of the industry. After a day of competing against the top student talent in Asia Pacific, we were awarded 1st Runner-Up.
Two-Year Legacy
This victory marked a significant personal milestone: back-to-back international wins at the Huawei Developer Competition (Bangkok 2024 and Hong Kong 2025).
It was the perfect way to wrap up my competitive journey at UGM. While I joked about “giving the next generation a chance” next year, the real takeaway was the power of a resilient team.
“Victory is sweet, but the ‘regroup and reflect’ phase after a loss is where the real engineering happens.”