Adrian Holovaty is an American web developer and journalist, living in Chicago, Illinois.
He is one of the lead developers of the Django web framework.
Holovaty grew up in Naperville, Illinois, where he developed a fascination with computers. As a first-generation American, he went to an Ukrainian school and often speaks to his parents in Ukrainian.
He enrolled at the University of Missouri–Columbia in August 1998 and graduated early in December 2001, receiving a bachelor degree in journalism.
In December 2002, Holovaty started work at World Online, the online department of the World Company, a family-owned media corporation in Lawrence, Kansas. While with World Online, he and other web developers created Django, an open source, high-level web application framework written in Python.
In 2005 he launched chicagocrime.org a freely browsable database of crimes reported in Chicago. The site won the 2005 Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism, was named by the New York Times as one of 2005's best ideas, and has been covered in various international media.
Holovaty continued to work on Django development after he left World Online in September 2005 to join washingtonpost.com, the flagship website of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive.
In May 2007 he was awarded a grant by the Knight Foundation, as part of the Knight News Challenge program. As a consequence, he left washingtonpost.com to found a Web startup, EveryBlock, that focuses on making local news and information useful.