William Holcomb 1151 White Top Road Bluff City, TN 37618
WeddingWire Hiring Manager,
In response to your advertisement of a summer internship position with the Search Inside the Music project / Project Aura (requisition #557786), I am submitting this resume for review.
From our call, I understand the purpose of this internship is to take several years of work from disparate sources and develop it into a coherent product. Ten years experience developing software has given me the skills needed to see this project completed. Depending on the exact state of the codebase, three months could be a relatively short period to launch a product of sufficient polish to gain momentum. Organizing classes while teaching in Mauritania, a year and a half contracting in Washington DC, and this past semester as a Ph.D. student at Vanderbilt all dealt with frequent hard and fast deadlines. Whether it was a site advertising an event or a scheduled research trial, I have learned to come up with a realistic plan and adjust it to meet deadlines. I understand the necessity of finding a balance between development time, catching the eye of users, and, if the system is open-sourced, providing the structure contributors need to feel productive.
My resume details my work experience, but I have several pertinent contributions to open-source projects as well. Recently, I have submitted patches to the MusicBrainz Picard tagger. Working previously with Java3D, I co-wrote a set of classes for j3d.org to create efficient screen overlays. On the Python front, the Apport project recently integrated code I wrote to do multipart POSTs into Ubuntu. Additionally, this past semester I prepared a literature survey covering a few of the papers in the field of MIR which gave me a good working sense of the technologies and methods involved.
I've always enjoyed music, but the issue began to focus on recommendations while in Peace Corps. Over the course of my service, I became increasingly involved in providing music for parties. I learned how hard it is to collect a set of songs that a diverse group will want to dance to. The search for music grew into a project called "1001 Good Songs." As a part of the chit-chat that goes with meeting a new person, I started asking for three songs that should be included in the list of the thousand best songs ever. It's been a couple of years now and the hundreds of recommendations I've gotten have done quite a bit to introduce me to interesting new artists. It's shown me that there's a huge amount of good music that people would like if they only had a chance to hear it. I believe that Search Inside the Music could be a part of finding a technical solution to that problem.
I am currently enrolled at Vanderbilt University. I will be available for the summer from May 5th to August 15th. If you need any additional information, feel free to contact me at wholcomb@gmail.com.
Thank you for your consideration,
Will Holcomb
10 February 2008