about me

Hi! My name is Jacob Hall.

I grew up as a military brat moving between Air Force installations, until my family settled in Arlington, Virginia when I was eight. There I attended H-B Woodlawn Secondary Program, a democratic public school which somehow survived beyond the 1970s and gave me an incredible community to grow up in. I spent my high school years running around barefoot, helping run the school's governing body including budget allocations and hiring committees, and even teaching my own class. It was awesome.

In 2018 I started college at James Madison University, and the next year I tranferred to William & Mary—both public universities in Virginia. I started studying biology and public policy, then switched to geology. To be honest my undergraduate experience was hampered by COVID-19, but I still managed to walk away with new friends and experience bartending at a meadery.

After graduation I stayed at William & Mary to continue working for AidData, a research lab studying international development. Through that work I've co-authored papers on geospatial analysis to understand development impact, traveled to coffee plots in Honduras and Ethiopia to train survey teams, and developed terabyte-scale data analysis systems. Alongside that position, I'm a part-time PhD student studying Computational Geography.

My partner Alyssa and I now live in downtown Richmond, Virginia. We've both become deeply involved with mapping, as part of MapRVA and the broader OpenStreetMap community in the U.S. and beyond. Mapping Richmond with friends led to the development of Yesterdays, a site which helps users find historical photos and place them on a map.