William Holcomb 3201 Westerwald Avenue Baltimore, MD 21218
Sunlight Foundation 1818 N Street NW, Suite 300 Washington, DC 20036
Dear Sir or Madam,
I was excited to see your job opening announcement for a Web Developer. My years of experience, passion for the cause of making data accessible and experience with large datasets combine to give me a solid foundation for the 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 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 have been following the Sunlight Foundation as a part of my interest in transparency and would relish the opportunity to lend my technical skills to as established team rather than trying to build an organization from the ground up.
My previous work includes all of the technologies your organization is looking for. 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.
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.