Adrian Holovaty is a journalist and computer programmer in Chicago. He’s the founder of EveryBlock, a neighborhood news Web site. He has worked as a Web developer/journalist 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 a 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. For fun, he plays gypsy-jazz guitar and posts YouTube videos.