William Holcomb
3201 Westerwald Avenue
Baltimore, MD 21218

Ms. Anna Spriggs
American Legacy Foundation
1724 Massachusetts Ave NW
Washington, DC 20036

Dear Ms. Spriggs,

I was excited to see your job opening announcement for an Internet Application Developer. I have been developing web applications for over ten years and I believe my variety of experience — both professional and academic — would make me a valuable addition to your organization.

Working as the web administrator for the Marijuana Policy Project, 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 meeting hard deadlines.

I left MPP to pursue a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Vanderbilt University. My time at Vandy was divided between my lab which focused on interface design (primarily for mobile robotics) and the psychology department where I studied both experimental methods and computational models of cognition. My interest in computer models of cognition led my to Sun Microsystems for a summer to work on their music recommendation engine.

This work includes all of the technologies your organization is looking for. Linux has been my desktop operating system for more than five years and the Ubuntu distribution includes contributions from me in both Python and Java. I have content management experience both in Java and PHP, and I have worked both with database design and mining in both MySQL and Postgresql.

Working at Legacy would provide me an opportunity for real-world study of information technology assisted behavior change. I am currently working on my thesis on the application of distributed graph databases in creating low cognitive workload interfaces. I'm particularly interested in the integration of web and mobile views of the internet-accessible resources and how that combination can provide a more engaging user experience.

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