Originally from New York City, Jonathan graduated from Brooklyn College and began developing Android apps for various organizations. He stumbled upon Greenstand on VolunteerMatch when he was looking for meaningful volunteer opportunities for Android developers. In 2019, Jonathan was able to attend SF Jam, a gathering of Greenstanders in San Francisco, California. As a fully remote organization, this was one of the first opportunities for members of the Greenstand community to collaborate in person. Between brainstorming sessions and beach meetings, attending SF Jam solidified Jonathan’s bond with the Greenstand community, and to this day, he is one of our MVPs!
When Jonathan began volunteering for Greenstand, the Treetracker app already existed, but it had some serious code-related issues. His primary goal was to clean up bugs and keep the code organized, but, like many contributors, he ended up falling into other projects afterwards. Among his other breakthrough developments, one of Jonathan’s main achievements was ensuring that the Treetracker’s upload function is stable enough to work properly, and not distorting tree capture photos, with extremely weak internet connection. Network connectivity is an issue that many of our tree growers face, and therefore this improvement was essential to the development of the Treetracker. Jonathan also created an app that utilized our first token-trading API back in January 2020, and version 2.0 will be released soon.
Jonathan was immediately drawn to Greenstand’s mission to help people out of poverty by providing environmentally sustainable employment. He also appreciated the openness and friendliness of our community. Jonathan’s favorite part about Greenstand is that almost everyone is a volunteer. “Everyone at Greenstand does this out of the goodness of their hearts,” he told us. Outside of Greenstand, COVID-19 has been a bit of a hindrance to Jonathan’s social life. To offset the boredom, he enjoys playing board games and video games, and he and his wife recently picked up skateboarding.
Jonathan, we are so appreciative of all your hard work on the Treetracker. Thank you!
Erin Baker
Communications Lead, Greenstand
erin.baker@greenstand.org
