William Holcomb 3201 Westerwald Avenue Baltimore, MD 21218
Salsa Labs 1700 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 403 Washington, DC 20009
Dear Sir or Madam,
I am writing in response to your posting on change.org for a software developer. I have more than ten years of development experience in a variety of languages and am very interested in lending my technical skills to an organization working on progressive social change.
As 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 collecting and organizing requirements and meeting hard deadlines.
I left MPP to pursue a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Vanderbilt University. My work there focused on interface design (primarily for mobile robotics) and computational models of cognition. My interest in computer models of cognition led me to Sun Microsystems for a summer where I worked on a recommendation algorithm on their grid platform.
In late 2008, a serious food crisis struck Mauritania where I served as a Peace Corps volunteer caused me to seriously rethink my career path. I took a leave of absence to work on my thesis from Baltimore and investigate starting a non-profit focused on using the internet to improve distribution systems.
In the last six months, I have learned how difficult it is to create an organization from the ground up. I am currently exploring lending my skills to an established organization rather than going it on my own. While at MPP, we migrated from Kintera to Convio and I know that there is a place in the market for a better solution.
I am a long time Linux user and the Ubuntu distribution includes contributions from me in both Python and Java. For deployment reasons, my content management has been primarily in PHP, but I am familiar with Rails. I have worked both with database design and mining in both MySQL and Postgresql. I've been writing Javascript for years and would enjoy the opportunity to learn more about Salsa.
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.