Adrian Holovaty is a Web developer in Chicago. He’s well known in the Python community for co-creating the Django Web framework. He’s one of two Benevolent Dictators For Life of the open-source project, and he cowrote the Django Book, available for free online (djangobook.com).

He enjoys reverse engineering things and creating order from madness. In 2005 he launched chicagocrime.org, one of the original Google Maps mashups, and Google credited the site with helping influence them to create a public mapping API. Around that time, he launched possibly the first site-specific browser plugin, a Firefox extension that corrected broken behavior of allmusic.com; this project influenced the creation of Greasemonkey and “user scripts.”

In 2007, he founded EveryBlock, a neighborhood news and discussion site. He sold it to msnbc.com in 2009 and now runs the product side of things there.

Adrian’s biggest passion is music, specifically guitar playing in the style of Django Reinhardt. He teaches gypsy jazz guitar classes at the Old Town School of Folk Music and posts guitar videos to YouTube, where 25,000 people have signed up to be notified when he posts a new video.