Robert Alonso and Alfredo De La Fuente, both with backgrounds in machine learning, participated in the Reproducibility Challenge, collaborating remotely from different countries to replicate and extend a paper on Variational Sparse Coding. The paper, which lacked some details on batch size and weights initialization, was reproduced successfully after communication with the original authors. The team suggested improvements such as using disentanglement metrics and emphasized the importance of reproducibility by recommending practices like setting random seeds and documenting environment details. They tackled challenges such as hyperparameter tuning and numerical stability, and leveraged resources like GPUs from Robert's university to manage computational demands. Their experience highlighted the need for more reproducible research practices and suggested that conferences consider reproducibility as a criterion for paper acceptance.