Adrian Holovaty
Adrian Holovaty
Adrian Holovatyis an American web developer, journalist 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."...
background combine computer create goal opportunity project resource split useful
My background is pretty evenly split between journalism, databases and computer programming, and this was an opportunity to combine all three. My goal for the project was to create a useful resource for Chicagoans.
adding code features few map since spent time
Since its launch, I haven't spent much time on it, other than adding a few features such as color-coded map markers and ZIP code browsing.
additional citizen create looking offering project searching side site ways work
I was looking for a side project to work on when I stumbled upon the Citizen ICAM site. That site is very useful, but I thought I could create a site that supplemented it by offering additional ways of sorting and searching the data.
based currently existing expensive experience less limited looking means open ours software source tools
From my limited experience looking at other such packages, ours is much less expensive and better software than the currently existing proprietary tools on the market. Also, it's based on open source technologies, which means there's no vendor lock-in.
feed grab page program provide screen site sort web
Unfortunately the ICAM site doesn't provide an RSS feed or any other sort of data-export capability, so my program does screen scraping, which is essentially retrieving a Web page and programmatically 'reading' the page to grab the data.