About Me

Hi, I’m Jonathan! Thanks for taking some interest in learning a bit more about me. You’re most likely reading this with an interest in my tech background, but I’ll gladly share a few personal tidbits too.

Professional

I started out primarily in implementation, though being in early stage start ups I had the benefit of working on architecture, team building, managing, and helping with other business functions (marketing, sales, HR).

No matter what work I did, I was always drawn to using PostgreSQL as part of the solution, which lead me to discovering I could contribute to the PostgreSQL community. My early PostgreSQL community contributions were around encouraging more people to use PostgreSQL through advocacy, first through events and then helping with the end-stages of the PostgreSQL release process. I ended up being able to focus on this professionally, both continuing advocacy efforts and helping to build products to run PostgreSQL on different environments, e.g. Kubernetes.

Currently I serve in leadership roles particularly around PostgreSQL and open source in general. For more details, please see my résumé.

Personal

I probably have more questions for you than you have for me, but that said, here is a little bit about myself.

  • I’m fortunate to have a wonderful and loving family who puts up with me, all of whom are more intelligent than me, including $LITTLE_HUMAN.
  • New Yorker. Lived in and around the city pretty much all my life, minus four years of college in Boston (well, technically not in Boston). Also I was there when the Red Sox won the world series for the first time in 800 years, which meant I had to be in hiding. However, watching the Giants beat the Pats helped make up for it, which leads to…
  • Die-Hard New York Jets fan, though I’ve come to think that adding “die-hard” is redundant as there’s no other type of Jets fan. I was still shocked at all the Jets hats I saw on the street in winter 2011 when we were in the AFC Championship. Anyway, as of this writing, I’m glad we’re finally taking a longer term approach to team building.
  • I started learning how to program on a TI-89 graphing calculator when I was 12. I had delusions of grandeur that I could write graphics-based games on a calculator in BASIC. However, it did ultimately lead me to PostgreSQL.
  • I had a competitive obsession with completing the New York Times crossword. My consecutive solve streak got to over 1000 before I fell asleep one night having thought I solved a Thursday puzzle, only to wake up and found out I didn’t. Fortunately, it gave me a break (and just as well as $LITTLE_HUMAN requires a bit of time), and now I work through several KenKen puzzles.
  • I’ve been fortunate to travel a bit. I particularly enjoy going to cooler environments, enjoy activities in and around nature (though I do prefer conveniences that lodgings offer), and like going to interesting cities.