Joey deVilla

Current

• Developer Evangelist at Microsoft

Past

• Nerd Wrangler (Technical Project Manager) at b5media
• Senior Developer at TSOT Inc.
• Technical Evangelist at Tucows

• Chief Programmer at His Own Bad Self
• Director of Developer Relations at OpenCola
• Chief Programmer at Datapanik Software Systems
• Chief Programmer at Mackerel Interactive Multimedia
• Programmer at Mackerel Interactive Multimedia

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Education

• Queen's University

Recommended

2 people have recommended Joey

Connections

271 connections

Industry

Information Technology and Services

Websites

• Global Nerdy
• "Accordion Guy"

Joey deVilla’s Summary

• Trusted technical evangelist with a strong track record of community building
• Dynamic speaker and presenter, comfortable in front of an audience, a camera or a microphone
• Skilled technical writer with graphic design skills
• Widely-read blogger with almost 2.5 million pageviews in 2008
• Seasoned developer who also likes to write documentation
• Rock accordion/keyboard player with stage and studio experience

Joey deVilla’s Experience

• Developer Evangelist

  Microsoft

  (Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; MSFT; Computer Software industry)

  October 2008 — Present (2 months)

  Rock and roll accordion-powered developer evangelist for Microsoft's web development tools and technologies.

• Nerd Wrangler (Technical Project Manager)

  b5media

  (Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Online Media industry)

  March 2008 — September 2008 (7 months)

  • Coordinated the activities of the b5 development team in building and maintaining its blog network, a Wordpress-based custom blogging system supporting over 300 blogs.
  • Developed the specification for Textpods, a self-serve system that allows small-budget advertisers to purchase text-link advertising on b5’s blogs.
  • Reviewed, triaged and prioritized of all outstanding projects.
  • Developed utilities in Ruby to automate the process of checking the entire set of b5’s blogs for the presence of important components such as advertising, web statistics codes and blogrolls.
  • Promoted the company and its projects through my blogs.

• Senior Developer

  TSOT Inc.

  (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Internet industry)

  November 2007 — March 2008 (5 months)

  • Co-led the development team in the design and implementation of FraternityLive and SororityLive, Ruby on Rails-based Facebook-like web applications for college students in “Greek organizations”.
  • Spearheaded the efforts to build and improve project documentation and to improve product management.
  • Hosted and performed the “opening monologue” for Ruby/Rails Project Night, a monthly “show and tell” gathering where local Ruby/Rails developers made presentations of their Ruby/Rails projects or a Ruby/Rails feature or technique.
  • Promoted the company and its projects through my blogs.

• Technical Evangelist

  Tucows

  (Public Company; 51-200 employees; Internet industry)

  July 2003 — November 2007 (4 years 5 months)

  • Promoted Tucows’ APIs and services to developers and the technical press.
  • Assisted developers in building custom software that used Tucows APIs and services.
  • Initiated projects to create easier-to-use client code libraries for the Tucows API (C# / PHP / Python / Ruby) and wrote and tested Windows ports of the Client Code Suite (PHP 5).
  • Wrote documentation and tutorials for several Tucows APIs and services including Blogware user manuals, installation and usage guides for the Client Code Suite, a series of articles covering the OpenSRS API and white papers describing Tucows’ services.
  • Created, edited and wrote The Farm, a developer-focused blog with articles and podcasts covering the Tucows platform, the domain name industry, web development and technology news. Peak readership: 30,000 pageviews/month.
  • Represented Tucows in local and national television interviews, industry conferences and gatherings for ISPs and developers, and my blogs.

• Chief Programmer

  His Own Bad Self

  (Information Technology and Services industry)

  January 2002 — July 2003 (1 year 7 months)

  • Designed and developed custom applications for clients using a number of tools including
  •• C# 1.0 / .NET Framework 1.0 / ASP.NET 1.0
  •• NSBasic (development tool for the Palm)
  •• PHP 4/5
  •• ASP / VBScript

• Director of Developer Relations

  OpenCola

  (Information Technology and Services industry)

  January 2000 — January 2002 (2 years 1 month)

  • Promoted the OpenCola platform (an application and platform that enabled recommendation-based search and file sharing through a peer-to-peer network) to developers and the technical press.
  • Developed applications including:
  •• OpenCola client v1.0 front end (Team leader, Visual Basic 6)
  •• OpenCola client v2.0 front end (Team member, Visual C++).
  •• Colavision: (Team leader, Visual Basic 6) OpenCola’s first released application, which scoured GnutellaNet for video and audio files and rebroadcast them using Windows Streaming Server.
  • Wrote the technical and user documentation for various OpenCola applications.
  • Represented OpenCola at various industry conferences and gatherings including the Intel P2P Conference, Microsoft’s 2001 mini-P2P conference in Redmond, O’Reilly’s first P2P conference and DefCon 2000 and 2001.

• Chief Programmer

  Datapanik Software Systems

  (Information Technology and Services industry)

  November 1997 — January 2000 (2 years 3 months)

  • Designed and developed custom business desktop applications for customers using either Visual Basic 5/6 or Macromedia Director. Major projects included:
  •• Shopping Directory on CD-ROM, 1998 and 1999 Editions: An encyclopedic directory of every shopping center in the United States built for National Research Bureau in Chicago. (Visual Basic 5 for 1998 edition, Visual Basic 6 for 1999 edition)
  •• HPS Training System: An athlete progress-tracking system designed for High Performance Specialists, an training facility for elite athletes including the Toronto Maple Leafs, Canadian Olympic ski and figure skating teams and the Royal Canadian Ballet. (Visual Basic 5)

• Chief Programmer

  Mackerel Interactive Multimedia

  (Information Technology and Services industry)

  March 1996 — March 1997 (1 year 1 month)

  • Led development teams and participated in the development of Macromedia Director-based multimedia applications, both desktop and online.
  • Reviewed the then-available multimedia development applications to determine the one on which the company would standardize; also researched up-and-coming technologies for their applicability for future development efforts.

• Programmer

  Mackerel Interactive Multimedia

  (Partnership; 11-50 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

  March 1995 — March 1996 (1 year 1 month)

Joey deVilla’s Education

• Queen's University

  B.Sc., Computer Science, 1987 — 1994

  Activities and Societies:

  Queen's Journal (Section Editor), Golden Words (Humour Editor / Production Manager), DJ (Clark Hall Pub), various Engineering Society projects, Keyboardist in the grunge band "Volume", notorious bon vivant, world's most unlikely big man on campus.

Additional Information

Joey deVilla’s Websites:

• Global Nerdy
• "Accordion Guy"

Joey deVilla’s Groups:

TorCamp

Joey deVilla’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• career opportunities
• consulting offers
• new ventures
• job inquiries
• expertise requests
• business deals
• reference requests
• getting back in touch