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 two posting from your website: java developer and web developer. I have more than ten years of development experience in a variety of languages and think that I am potentially qualified for either position.
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 continued to work with interface design as a part of the Human-Machine Teaming lab at Vanderbilt. I worked primarily with display of information through map overlays. 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.
My leave of absence taught me how difficult it is to create an organization from the ground up. I completed my Masters in December and I'm looking for an organization such as Salsa Labs which is working to create the tools to change how non-profits interact with their supporters.
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 most recent work has been Javascript with copious amounts of jQuery.
If you you need any additional information, please contact me at will@dhappy.org or see my résumé. Thank you for your time, and I look forward to hearing from you.