Team | Techorama

Gill Cleeren

Gill Cleeren is the CTO of Xebia Microsoft Services Belgium and he is a Microsoft Regional Director, Microsoft MVP and Pluralsight author. Gill focuses on architecture for web and mobile projects. Gill is a frequent speaker at many international conferences and founder of Techorama, the biggest IT conference in Belgium.

Pieter Gheysens

Pieter Gheysens is the Managing Director at Xebia Microsoft Services Belgium and focuses as a consultant and Microsoft MVP on Application Lifecycle Management solutions based on Azure DevOps and GitHub.

Kevin DeRudder

Kevin DeRudder is a freelance Full Stack .NET developer, competence coach and trainer. Next to this, Kevin is invited as a speaker on many occasions to give Web Development training or presentations.

Techorama is a community conference. Our conference and the agenda are built with the support of the Dutch Microsoft community. Here’s a list of the core members of Techorama Netherlands.

Marcel De Vries

Marcel is the co-founder and CEO of Xpirit Group. Xpirit started as an individual company under the Xebia group in 2014 and is now transformed into the Microsoft business unit of Xebia worldwide! Xpirit provides high-end consulting services to companies worldwide on Microsoft Azure, DevOps, Cloud Native Software Development, and Managed Services.

Marcel loves to learn new technologies and use this to advance his customers. He shares his learnings at conferences and training. Marcel often explains his CEO title to the leadership teams of other companies as having a second meaning: Coding Executive Officer. This is driven by his strong belief that great leaders in tech need to be technical! Only by staying on top of technology, you can lead the way going forward.

Marcel is a frequently asked public speaker at well-known industry events like Microsoft //Build, Microsoft Ignite, Azure Lowlands, Visual Studio Live!, Techorama, and KCDC, to name a few.

Marcel has been awarded by Microsoft the Microsoft MVP award for more than 16 consecutive years and has been a Microsoft Regional Director since 2008. You can always contact him to talk about subjects like Cloud Adoption Strategies, Business Development, DevOps, Cloud Computing, Microservices, Containers, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.

Dennis Vroegop

Dennis Vroegop is a freelance interim CTO, software architect, speaker, and 17 times awardee of the Microsoft MVP Award (AI). He is a designer and developer of new ways to interact with people, using multi-touch systems and camera-based solutions. Dennis feels most comfortable when leading teams to a better way of working. Software development teams on the Microsoft platform, including but not limited to stakeholders, product owners, product managers, developers, and customers benefit from his knowledge of good teamwork, quality assurance, and professional software development. He has been developing software since the early 80s, starting out on the Commodore 64. He taught himself to program the games that his friends ended up playing. He writes software in many languages and environments. After graduating in the field of computer sciences from Amsterdam, Dennis started to work as a developer, but quickly took over the role of a lead R&D engineer. After a couple of years, he started his own company, seeing most developers back then were not treated the way he wanted them to be treated. By always mixing his technical skills with his management style, he quickly became someone with whom people wanted to work with. In 2007, Dennis started to get into the world of Natural User Interfaces, driven by his passion to provide everyone an access to information. His goal is to enable everyone, regardless of income, capabilities, social background, and so on, to be able to get in touch with computers. This led to the formation of Interknowlogy Europe, a company that aims at getting great and easy-to-use software using technologies such as HoloLens into the world. Dennis is the coauthor of the LinkedIn Learning video training, Developing for Microsoft HoloLens. He is also a proficient professional speaker at small and large events. He is the chairman of the largest Dutch .NET user group dotNed.

Lindsey Broos

Lindsey Broos, a .NET consultant at Team4Talent based in Belgium, graduated in 2008 as a Medical Lab technician. After a successful decade in a phytopathology lab, Lindsey's career took an unexpected turn when she got infected by the IT virus while working as a crew member at Techorama since its inception. Currently, she is deeply immersed in the tech world, serving as a .NET developer at Team4Talent with a keen focus on web development. Lindsey is an active figure in the tech community, holding leadership roles such as the lead of Visug (the .NET User Group in Belgium) and contributing as a crew member to Techorama, the largest Microsoft-oriented conference in Belgium and the Netherlands. In addition to her impactful community involvement, Lindsey is also a Pluralsight author, sharing her expertise through online courses and contributing to the continuous learning of the global tech community. Her diverse background, spanning both medical and technological domains, reflects in her dynamic approach to software development, community engagement, and educational outreach.

Roland Guijt

Roland is a Microsoft MVP enjoying a constant curiosity around new techniques in software development. His focus is on all things .Net and browser technologies. As a long-time trainer, he leads many courses on these topics and speaks about them at international conferences. He is also a well-known Pluralsight author. The word that comes to mind when he thinks about software development is passion!

Sjoukje Zaal

Sjoukje Zaal is a Microsoft Azure MVP and a Microsoft Principal Expert with over 15 years of experience providing architecture, development, consultancy and design expertise on Microsoft-related technologies. She works at Ordina, a System Integrator in the Netherlands. Sjoukje is active in the Microsoft Community as a writer, public speaker and as a forum moderator and answerer on MSDN/TechNet. She is co-founder of SP&C NL, a Dutch site with articles related to Azure, Office 365, Office and SharePoint. She is also co-founder of the Mixed Reality User Group, which focusses on new technologies on the Microsoft platform, like the HoloLens, AI, Machine Learning, Azure and more.

Albert Alberts

Anjuli Jhakry

Anjuli Jhakry is a Microsoft MVP and a .NET developer at 4DotNet. She works with technologies like .NET MAUI, .NET Blazor, and Microsoft Entra ID. Anjuli loves to share knowledge and create content on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok (find her at @CodeWithAnjuli). Through these platforms, Anjuli explains difficult subjects in a easy-to-understand way, hoping that other developers will become as enthousiast about the different Microsoft technologies as she is. Besides this, Anjuli enjoys giving presentations about .NET Blazor, Microsoft Entra ID and other interesting topics related to Microsoft technologies, or her own experiences as a software developer.

Nico Vermeir

Nico Vermeir is an application architect at Inetum-Realdolmen in Belgium since 2010, where he has a strong focus on building and architecting modern applications. Being a strong believer in the importance of communities he tries to share knowledge wherever he can, be it on social media, at a user group or conference. He has spoken on many international conferences such as NDC Oslo, NDC Sydney, NDC London, Swetugg, Build Stuff, DotNext.

Maarten Balliauw

Maarten Balliauw loves building web and cloud apps. His main interests are in ASP.NET MVC, C#, Microsoft Azure, PHP and application performance. He co-founded MyGet and is Developer Advocate at JetBrains. He’s an ASP Insider and a former MVP for Microsoft Azure. Maarten is a frequent speaker at various national and international events, organizes Azure User Group events and is a track owner for Techorama. In his free time, he likes brewing his own beer. Maarten’s blog can be found at http://blog.maartenballiauw.be.

Mike Martin

As a Microsoft Technical Evangelist, Mike is an Azure goto for ISV’s (independent software vendors). He’s been active in the IT industry for more than 20 years and has performed almost all types of job profiles, going from coaching and leading a team to architecting and systems design and training. Today he’s primarily into the Microsoft Cloud Platform and Application Lifecycle Management. He’s not a stranger to both dev and IT Pro topics, they even call him the perfect hybrid solution. In January 2012 he became a crew member of AZUG, the Belgian Microsoft Azure User Group. As an active member he’s both involved in giving presentations and organizing events (like ITProceed, Techorama and Global Azure Bootcamp aka GAB). Mike was also a Microsoft Azure MVP (awarded 5 times) and Microsoft Azure Advisor. Helping out in the community and introducing new & young people into the world of Microsoft and technology is also one of his passions.

Eduard Keilholz

Eduard is a Cloud Solution Architect at 4DotNet (The Netherlands). He likes to help customers with implementing and experiencing cloud technologies. He likes to create highly performant software and help team members reach a higher skill level of software development. He focusses is on the Microsoft development stack, mainly C# and the Microsoft Azure Cloud, and has a strong affinity with Angular. He enjoys speaking at (inter)national conferences and contributing to community events. In 2020, Microsoft has recognized these community activities with the Microsoft MVP Award for Azure.

Techorama Founders