William Holcomb
3201 Westerwald Avenue
Baltimore, MD 21218

Lisa Beyer
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, MD

Dear Ms. Beyer,

I am writing in response to the posting from your website for a software engineer. I have more than ten years of development experience in a variety of languages and would bring valuable skills to the position.

As web administrator for MPP, I was responsible for the maintenance of both their primary site of over 10,000 pages 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 collecting and organizing requirements and meeting hard deadlines.

I continued to work with interface design as a part of the Human-Machine Teaming lab at Vanderbilt. I focused primarily with display of information through map overlays. My interest in computer models of cognition and mining of large data sets led me to Sun Microsystems for a summer where I worked on a recommendation algorithm on their grid platform.

I took a leave of absence from my graduate work once I had completed my classes to work on my thesis and research the design of distributed data stores for use in improving logistical systems. I completed my Masters at the end of 2010 and am now looking for an interesting position where I can leverage my skills for some social good.

I am a long time Linux user and the Ubuntu distribution includes contributions from me in both Python and Java. I have worked both with database design and data mining in both MySQL and Postgresql. My course work at Vanderbilt included experience with Matlab. My most recent work has been javascript and jQuery interfacing with web services and java applications.

If you you need any additional information, please contact me at will@dhappy.org or see my résumé at will.madstones.com. Thank you for your time, and I look forward to hearing from you.