b5media

March 28th,2008

b5media welcomes Joey deVilla as our “nerd wrangler”!

By Administrator

We’re pleased to welcome Joey deVilla to the b5media fold as our
Technical Project Manager, or as he likes to put it, “Nerd Wrangler”.
Joey brings 14 years’ worth of experience in software development and
technical promotion — and 9 years’ worth of rock and roll accordion
playing.

Joey comes to us from a short stint at TSOT, where he did Ruby on
Rails development, and prior to that, he was Tucows’ Technical
Evangelist, where he promoted their internet services, managed their
blogs, developed sample code and specialized documentation and helped
developers use Tucows’ APIs.

Joey has worked on all sorts of development projects ranging from
“Virtual Bubble Wrap”, one of the earliest popular Shockwave
amusements to interactive CD-ROMS for Toyota to athlete-tracking
software used by the trainers of the Toronto Maple Leafs and Canadian
Olympic Ski Team to an application cataloging every shopping mall in
the United States to refugee claim processing applications for the
Government of Canada.

In addition to his work as a software developer, Joey is also involved
with tech community-building. He is one of the stewards of DemoCamp, a
regular gathering of developers, businesspeople, investors and other
people interested in making Toronto a better place for people in high
tech to live work and play. As a steward, he helps organize and hosts
DemoCamp meetups, which boast a regualr attendance of over 400 people.
He is also an active participant in other smaller tech
community-oriented events and hosts a monthly Ruby/Rails Project
Night.

Joey has two blogs: his personal blog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy
in the 21st Century, and his technical blog, Global Nerdy. The
“Accordion Guy” blog has been nominated for a “Bloggie” award twice.

No bio of Joey is complete without mentioning the accordion. Joey is
often seen playing rock and pop tunes on his accordion at parties and
on the street. He credits the accordion for landing him a number of
appearances on MTV, MuchMusic, HGTV and even the W Network as well as
getting him a lot of free drinks. He likes to refer to it as “social
hardware”.

Joey joined b5media just in time to travel with us to the South by
Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, which he called
“the best first week on the job ever!”

A longtime resident of the city, Joey will work out of the Toronto
office. We’re happy to have Joey join the b5media family!