About us
We are Visug, the Belgian Visual Studio User Group. We unite both developers and partners who are active in the Visual Studio and Microsoft ecosystem.
Our mission is to bring the community together with talks, to create the optimal environment to inform and network with your peers, with a focus on Microsoft stack but open to innovative debate.
During regular evening sessions and an annual event, we meet to learn about new technologies and discuss the life of the developer. Hard skills and soft skills are the subjects of our talks which are accompanied by food and beverages.
To inspire each other and strengthen the community, we welcome you to talk about topics that are of interest to our community. Visug facilitates the talks, provides support and gives valuable feedback. We are a podium for first-time speakers and experienced community rock stars.
Our community is actively supported by high profile partners, who are passionate about developer’s lives and the future of software development.
Meet the team
Lindsey Broos
Lindsey Broos graduated in 2008 as a Medical Lab technician. After a career of 10 years in a phytopathology lab, she was infected by the IT virus by working as a crew member at Techorama since the first edition. She made the switch to her new passion and is now currently working as a .NET developer at Team4Talent, where she’s focusing on web development.
Gill Cleeren
Gill Cleeren is a Microsoft Regional Director, Visual Studio MVP and Pluralsight author. Gill focuses on web and mobile development and loves Xamarin. Gill is a frequent speaker at many international conferences such as TechDays, TechEd, NDC, VSLive and many more. He also is the founder of Techorama, the biggest IT conference in Belgium and he runs Visug, the .NET user group in Belgium as well. You can find his website at www.snowball.be.
Pieter Gheysens
Pieter Gheysens is the founder of Sparkles (www.sparkles.be) and focuses as a Visual Studio ALM MVP and Certified Scrum Master on Application Lifecycle Management solutions based on Team Foundation Server. During the last 6 years, Pieter has been involved in many large enterprise development projects as an ALM expert. He’s passionate about setting up the optimal team development environment to deliver high quality software and strives to get the best out of people, tools and processes.
Johnny Hooyberghs
Johnny Hooyberghs is a coordinator and consultant for Involved (www.involved-it.be) and a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP focusing on full-stack .NET development and architecture. Johnny is a frequent speaker at international conferences such as NDC, DevDays Europe, .NET DeveloperDays, Update Conference, etc. Next to software development, Johnny also has a soft spot for theme parks and rollercoasters. You can find him traveling the world and working himself through his bucket list, riding as many rollercoasters as possible.
Wesley Cabus
Wesley Cabus is a Coding Architect at Xpirit in Belgium (https://xpirit.com), where he helps organizations to build better applications, helps teams to improve their skills and organizes workshops to share knowledge.
He's also a Microsoft Azure MVP, crew member at Techorama, global organizer of the Global Azure Bootcamp and has spoken at both local meetups and usergroups and conferences like BuildStuff, NDC, DotNext, TechDays and DevSum.
Pieter Nijs
Pieter Nijs is Mobile Development Expert at Xpirit in Belgium. He helps customers with 'everything mobile and cloud', from thinking along with an initial concept, to technical analysis, development, coaching other team members,...
You can find him speaking at conferences, giving trainings and blogging at blog.pieeatingninjas.be
Since 2017 Pieter has been awarded with a Microsoft MVP Award in the Windows Development category for sharing his passion and expertise with the community.
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 Twitter, at a user group or conference. He has spoken on many international conferences such as NDC Sydney, NDC London, Swetugg, Build Stuff, DotNext.
Nico is a Microsoft MVP in Developer Technologies and a crew member of Techorama BE and NL.
In his spare time he enjoys brewing (and tasting) beer, playing the guitar, riding his Harley-Davidson and doing Karate.