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".
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]
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 serviceNextdoor and shut down.[20]
