There’s a nice profile of Adrian Holovaty, creator of Django and chicagocrime.org, in the American Journalism Review.
Adrian gives an amazing talk entitled Computer Programming as Journalism, in which he describes his work at LJWorld.com, the newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas where he created home pages for every little league and school sports team, and set up mechanisms for the parents to upload their own photos and comments. In my talks to publishers, I summarize his approach by rewording Edwin Schlossberg’s maxim that “the skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think” as “the skill of programming is to create a context in which other people can share.”
Since chicagocrime.org, he’s been thinking a lot about the role of structured information in news reporting. He’s one of the most fascinating developers around, a real innovator at the junction of computer science and publishing, and one of the next-generation Python superstars.
We wrote about Adrian previously in A Week in Chicago with Rails, Perl and Django, and EuroOscon Keynoters.