William Holcomb 3201 Westerwald Avenue Baltimore, MD 21218
GlobalGiving 1023 15th Street, NW Washington, DC 20005
Dear Sir,
I was excited to see your job opening announcement for a Java web developer. I believe my background and skills would make me an excellent addition to your organization. From working in Java3D during my undergraduate co-op to writing music recommendation software at Sun Microsystems on their grid platform, I have nearly ten years of Java programming experience.
My work has included many of the technologies that you want in a job candidate. Though most of my Java web development used Cocoon, I worked developing a Struts 1 taglib using Torque for ORM. I have used Spring for dependency injection and am familiar with several persistence frameworks. My team at Sun used Agile sprints and standups as their development process, and I very much like working with concrete deliverables and manageable timeframes.
As the web administrator for the Marijuana Policy Project, I was responsible for the maintenance of their sites and regularly coordinated with different departments to deliver campaign sites targeted to specific groups and policy reforms. These sites frequently coordinated with larger media campaigns and this work helped strengthen my skills in meeting hard deadlines.
I left MPP to to pursue a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Vanderbilt University. After a year and a half of classwork, however, a food crisis in Mauritania where I served as a Peace Corps volunteer caused me to seriously question the direction of my professional path. I took a leave of absence to attempt to start a non-profit focused on using computer systems to help alleviate poverty.
After six months, I've learned the process of starting a business is far more complex and difficult than I had imagined. In particular, I understand that the image of the rugged individualist striking out on their own and forging a new direction makes for an entertaining movie, but in the real world change most often happens incrimentally and cooperatively. Working for GlobalGiving would give me the opportunity to focus on my skills as a technologist to help build momentum in an existing organization rather than undertaking it all myself.
If you you need any additional information, please contact me at wholcomb@gmail.com. Thank you for your time, and I look forward to hearing from you.