When I first heard about Share Cluj, the project was yet an idea, the team was still discussing about the purpose of the project, thinking how to involve more people and how to put Cluj on the world map. Initially, my role in the project was to be an ambassador but, by participating to a team meeting having as main subject the technical part, I immediately became a member of the team. 

When someone says “data modeling”, everyone thinks automatically to relational databases, to the process of normalizing the data, to the 3rd normal form etc.; and that is a good practice, it also means that the semesters studying databases paid off and affected your way of thinking and working with data. However, ever since college, things have changed, we do not hear so much about relational databases, although they are still used with predominance in applications. Nowadays, “big data” is in trend, but it is also a situation when more and more applications need to handle: the volume, the velocity, the variety, and the complexity of the data (according to Gartner’s definition).

The 2013 edition of the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) took place in Mexico, Cancun – a rather exotic setting for us Europeans. Along with the pleasant location it is also worth mentioning that CEC is one of the biggest and most important conferences, its main topic being evolutionary computation – which gives the enthusiasts in the field of evolutionary computation, such as myself, at least two reasons to participate in this event.