About Sam

Sam Debruyn currently works as a Technical Lead Data & Cloud at dataroots . At the age of 10, he began to read programming books and it never stopped fascinating him. In the next decade, he continued to develop this passion by learning about different programming languages and technologies and ended up making a career out of his hobby.

After gaining 4 years of experience in data & cloud engineering and after about 10 years of experience in software engineering and architecture, he embarked on the mission of tech lead for the data & cloud unit at dataroots. Sam has worked on tens of projects in multiple sectors with companies of all sizes and varying technologies. This includes small companies like local start-ups, multinationals, as well as banks and one of Belgium’s biggest players in the public transportation sector. He started his career in mobile application development with Xamarin and transitioned into focusing more on cloud technologies. In 2020 he made the switch to data engineering.

In the role of tech lead data & cloud at dataroots, Sam is responsible for the technical aspects of the cloud and data engineering projects. By working closely with customers, he designs and advises on building, extending, and using data platforms to match their exact needs. He coaches and guides teams through technical challenges and helps them to grow.

The Microsoft stack is where Sam feels at home. By using Microsoft Azure from when it was still called Windows Azure and by working with all aspects of the cloud, he became a trusted source of knowledge for his colleagues and customers. In 2024 Sam received the Microsoft MVP award in the Data Platform category.

Sharing knowledge is at the heart of everything that Sam believes in. He is a regular speaker at local and international conferences and meetups and he organized lots of local meetups on the topics he was or is passionate about: Azure, dbt, Terraform, Airflow, Prefect, .NET, Xamarin…

Next to sharing knowledge, contributing back to open source projects is also something Sam truly believes in. With over 200 closed pull requests on public organizations on GitHub, he gained a lot of knowledge on the inner workings of popular technologies. He is a maintainer of the dbt adapters for all Microsoft SQL products like SQL Server, Azure SQL, Azure Synapse, and Microsoft Fabric.

Computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better.

– Donald Knuth