| Adrian Holovaty | |
| Birth Place: | Naperville, Illinois |
| Nationality: | American |
| Known For: | Django Web framework |
| Occupation: | web developer, musician, entrepreneur |
| Alma Mater: | Missouri School of Journalism (B.A., 2001) |
Adrian Holovaty (born 1981) is an American web developer, musician and entrepreneur from Chicago, Illinois, living in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He is co-creator of the Django web framework and an advocate of "journalism via computer programming".
Holovaty, a Ukrainian American, grew up in Naperville, Illinois and attended Naperville North High School. While serving as co-editor of the high school's newspaper, The North Star, a censored article about a faculty member sexually assaulting a student reignited an anti-censorship debate in the Illinois house of representatives.[1] He graduated from the Missouri School of Journalism in 2001 and worked as a web developer/journalist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Lawrence Journal-World and The Washington Post before starting EveryBlock, a web startup that provided "microlocal" news, in 2007.[2]
While working at the Lawrence Journal-World from 2002 to 2005, he and other web developers (Simon Willison, Jacob Kaplan-Moss and Wilson Miner[3]) created Django, an open source web application framework for Python. He and Kaplan-Moss served as the framework's Benevolent Dictators for Life until January 2014.[4] The pair wrote The Django Book, first published in 2007.
In 2012, he and PJ Macklin founded Soundslice, a website for learning, practicing and teaching music, via "interactive sheet music" that is synced with real audio and video recordings.[5]
In 2018, he was named co-chair of the W3C Music Notation Community Group, given responsibility over developing MNX, a new, open format for encoding music notation.[6]
Holovaty is a Fingerstyle and Gypsy jazz guitarist. Since 2007 he has posted videos of his acoustic guitar arrangements on YouTube, building an audience of more than 30,000 subscribers.[7]
In 2023, he released an album of 10 original guitar instrumentals, "Melodic Guitar Music."[8]
He has served on the guitar faculty of Django In June, an instructional camp for Gypsy jazz music, for several years.[9]
In 2005, Holovaty launched chicagocrime.org, a Google Maps mashup of Chicago Police Department crime data.[10] The site won the 2005 Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism[11] and was named by The New York Times as one of 2005's best ideas.[12]
As one of the first Google Maps mashups, it helped influence Google to create its official Google Maps API.[13] Newspaper sites such as the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times have incorporated a map from EveryBlock, the successor to chicagocrime.org, into their web sites.[14]
In 2007, Holovaty was awarded a $1.1 million Knight Foundation grant and left his job as editor of editorial innovations at washingtonpost.com to start EveryBlock, the successor to chicagocrime.org.[15] On August 17, 2009, EveryBlock was officially acquired by MSNBC.[16] The terms of the deal were not disclosed.[17] In February 2013, NBC News announced that it was shutting down EveryBlock.[18] The service was re-launched by Comcast NBCUniversal in January, 2014 and operated in Boston, Chicago, Denver, Fresno, Hialeah, Houston, Medford, Nashville, Philadelphia, and Seattle.[19] On July 19, 2018, EveryBlock was acquired by social networking service Nextdoor and shut down.[20]