On the 12th and the 13th of November 2019, we invite you to attend the 7th edition of Cluj IT Days. Last year’s focus was on #BuildingTomorrow. This year’s theme will be #ProgrammingARt. Obviously, we focus on development as art. Moreover, we try to highlight the connections between art by and large, as field of creativity, and development. We have a couple of surprises which will make the conference even more interesting. IT Days 2019 will take place on the 4 stages at Casa de Cultură a Studenților (Students’ Cultural Hall) in Cluj-Napoca. We expect to have 800 - 1000 participants / day. We will touch upon topics such as: Products & Leadership, AI, Automotive, Industry 4.0, Testing, Serverless and Microservices, AR and VR, Security, Management, SAP, Agile, Research, Web, Start-ups, Software Architecture, Coding, DevOps and Hands on lab. All the details related to the presentations and the agenda will be made available in the forthcoming weeks and months.

One of the questions that I hear very often has to do with Romanian intellectual property, especially in the Cluj IT ecosystem. Even though, in Cluj, several local start-ups have stood up from the crowd, we can say that we neither have a benchmark, nor a small unicorn, if you wish. There are many reasons why this initiative was not steered in the right direction. Even though there are events, like Startup Weekend or Techsylvania, which get involved in start-up support, unfortunately, many of these initiatives are short-lived. What might be the reasons for this state of affairs? It may be either because the initiated number of projects is inferior to the actual needs of the society, or because the financial resources and the other means of ensuring support are much too modest to be able to lead to the implementation of the respective project. We can also add the competition that comes from Western Europe, a fierce competition which is usually the winner at local competitions.