Beyond SELECT *; Data Retrieval 101

In a tech ecosystem drowning in data, simply fetching it is no longer the bottleneck. The engineering challenge is extracting the signal from the noise.

When your dataset scales to billions of entities, a standard SELECT * isn't just inefficient—it's a system architecture failure. The era of simple CRUD operations being enough is facing deprecation.

The future belongs to builders who understand how to rank, model, and retrieve exactly what matters.

Stories of the Web is back online and as always, is there to help you navigate the tides. 🌊

We are kicking off the summer by cutting through the data hype and getting straight to the core logic. No fluff, just the raw reality of how to build systems that actually find the needle in the haystack.

To do that, we’re bringing in an engineer who works deep in the trenches of massive-scale data delivery.
We are thrilled to host Ștefan Georgescu, Software Engineer @ Veridion.
Ștefan isn’t just hooking up basic APIs; he’s architecting the infrastructure and algorithms that power complex company search and data retrieval at scale. He brings a pragmatic, "living room talk" approach to deep technical challenges, moving past the theory and straight into what actually works in production.

🎙️ *The Talk: Beyond SELECT ; Data Retrieval 101
A deep dive into the architecture of modern data retrieval.
We’re debugging how we query the world:
🧠 Signal Modelling & Ranking: How to actually define and surface the "right" data when everything looks like a match.
🧱 Real-World Architecture: Battle-tested examples from Veridion’s company search algorithms, plus common domain use cases.
🛡️ From Query to Retrieval: Why finding the data is only half the battle, and how to architect the systems that serve it efficiently.
👀 Real Talk: What it actually takes to build and maintain data retrieval pipelines that don't break when the complexity scales.

🚀 Who needs to be in the room?

• Software Engineers & Architects who want to upgrade their stack from basic database queries to high-performance retrieval systems.
• Data Engineers trying to separate the pure signal from the absolute noise in complex datasets.
• Tech Leads & EMs looking to understand the architectural requirements for modern data-heavy products.

📅 SAVE THE DATE: Thursday, May 28th, 18:30
📍 One Cotroceni Building C – 11th Floor Str. Sergent Nuțu Ion 44, București

📝 Small agenda:
18:30 → 19:00 — Welcome, networking & food
19:00 → 20:00 — Live session with Ștefan 20:00 → 20:30 — Q&A, deep dives & curiosities

Attendance is free, but seats are limited and security requires pre-registration.

👉 Please make sure to provide your full name and email address so we can add you to the building's access list.

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💬 The industry is generating more noise than ever. You can either keep running brute-force legacy queries or upgrade your architecture. Come hang out with the builders who are learning how to extract the signal.