About Jonathan

A lifelong resident of Flatbush/Kensington, Brooklyn, New York, I am in love with New York City.  The unique opportunities and experiences it has afforded me has made me into the person I am, and for that I will be forever grateful.

I graduated CUNY Brooklyn College through the Macaulay Honors College in 2008 with a B.A. in Classics and Linguistics.  I am fascinated with languages, and I have studied Latin, Ancient Greek, Italian, French, and Spanish,  so far.  I also am an experienced computer programmer/web developer, working mainly with HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript and whatever else I can find that’s fun and productive to use.

I’ve spent a number of years involved in community and political affairs.  I served as President of the Brooklyn Young Republican Club, founded in 1880.  I even ran in a Special Election for New York City Council in 2010, the experience of which taught me much about politics in New York City.  Up until the summer of 2011, I worked at my local community board, Brooklyn Community Board 14, which played an even more significant role in my understanding and appreciation for the limited, community-oriented  decentralized administration of government.

As for hobbies, traveling is by far my favorite pastime, and, of course, the extensive sampling of cuisine is very much a part of that.  Thus far, besides within the United States, I’ve been to Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Argentina, Italy, Spain, France, and Israel–and I hope to expand that list significantly in the years to come.  Next to traveling, music is one of my other primary enjoyable distractions.  Not only do I play a couple of instruments myself (and attempting to learn a few others), I also have a preference  for exploring non-English speaking artists from abroad.

What am I up to now?  I work for a web application development company, Codacity LLC, with my good friend, Roy Antoun, which both of us co-founded in 2011.  Meanwhile, I am enrolled in New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study in pursuit of an M.A. in politics and communications, mainly focusing on innovative solutions for fighting corruption and implementing reform.