techorama, deep knowledge IT conference
Oct 07 - 09 | 2024 Utrecht Netherlands

Techorama Founders

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 Xpirit Belgium and focuses as a consultant and Microsoft MVP on Application Lifecycle Management solutions based on Azure DevOps and GitHub. During the last decade, Pieter has been involved in many large enterprise development projects as an ALM & DevOps expert. He’s passionate about setting up the optimal team development environment to deliver high quality software. Pieter also founded the Visual Studio User Group in Belgium.

Kevin DeRudder

Kevin DeRudder is Competence Manager at Elmos (https://www.elmos.be). At Elmos, he works closely with the consultants to help them taking the next step in their career. Next to this, Kevin is invited as a speaker on many occasions to give Web Development training or presentations.

Techorama NL Core & Content Team

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.

Andre Obelink

As author of many software development related articles and – books, and as speaker on user group meetings and conferences, André is already more than fifteen years active in the Microsoft .NET community. He runs the .NET Oost Meetup community and focuses on trying to attract students to the (cross platform) Microsoft ecosystem. For his community efforts, he was awarded from 2006-2016 with a Microsoft MVP award. In his daily life he leads his own software company and works as a consultant and/or senior software engineer for some bigger companies in The Netherlands. You can find his blog on http://www.obelink.com.

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