Adrian Holovaty

Adrian Holovaty, a journalist and computer programmer, is the founder of EveryBlock, a local news Web site funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation. He has developed award-winning Web applications for washingtonpost.com, Lawrence.com and LJWorld.com, and he is probably the best-known industry advocate for the burgeoning discipline of "journalism via computer programming."

His 2005 project chicagocrime.org, one of the original Google Maps "mashups," was developed by reverse-engineering Google's map technology. The site won the Grand Prize in the 2005 Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism, but, more importantly, it played no small part in influencing Google to open its mapping infrastructure for all to use.

Adrian co-created Django, an open-source development framework that makes it fast and easy for programmers to build database-driven Web sites. It is used by tens of thousands of people around the world. Adrian cowrote the Django Book, published in late 2007.

He graduated from the Missouri School of Journalism in 2001 and lives with his wife in Chicago. For fun, he plays gypsy-jazz guitar and posts YouTube videos.