Yaron Koren

I'm currently a freelance web programmer, living in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Before that I lived in Manhattan, and before that I went to MIT. I grew up in Haifa, Israel, and then Amherst, MA.

My weblog

Semantic wikis - These days I do almost exclusively MediaWiki development, based around the Semantic MediaWiki plugin, which I think is world-changing. I've created five extensions around it, among them Semantic Forms (the most important one), which allows for the creation of collaborative, form-based structured data; Semantic Drilldown, which provides an interface for browsing that data; Semantic Calendar, which enables calendars for viewing semantic date data; and Data Transfer, for viewing such data in XML form (as opposed to more complex formats like RDF). See an explanation of all the Semantic MediaWiki extensions, and a biography of my MediaWiki development career.
Ruby on Rails - there's nothing better for web programming.
Battlestar Galactica - respect.
Jean-Michel Basquiat - the greatest?
Music - at one time or another, I've played the clarinet, saxophone, piano, guitar, bass guitar and drums. I'm partial to indie pop, New York hip hop and small-group jazz.

Computer Arithmetic Algorithms Simulator - a site I created for my dad. I did most of the layout and some of the programming.
NewYorkNabes, the renter's guide to New York City neighborhoods - I programmed it.
Discourse DB - co-created with Nick Grandy; we based it on top of MediaWiki and the Semantic MediaWiki plugin, and later I improved it with Semantic Forms and my other semantic extensions. In my opinion, it was (and is) the first true wiki database.
Betocracy - my (mostly) solo project. Lets users create their own prediction markets. It's basically a defunct project at this point - see here for why.

The C Programming Language, Kernighan and Ritchie - don't all of us still need to know C, pretty much?
Programming Perl, Larry Wall et al. - when there are no answers, Perl is the answer.
Programming Ruby, Dave Thomas et al. - my new favorite language.
Agile Web Development with Rails, Thomas, Hansson et al. - revolutionary, etc.

The Humane Interface, Jef Raskin - give users just one way to do anything, and let them undo it afterwards.
Don't Make Me Think, Steve Krug - your web site is usually more confusing than you think it is.

The Mythical Man-Month, Frederick Brooks - when the software gets too complex, don't hesitate to start from scratch.
Getting Real, Jason Fried et al. - stay small, keep things simple, and release quickly. Is that so hard?
Siddhartha, Herman Hesse - just 160 pages and set in the 5th century B.C., but it's all in there.

You can contact me at yaron57 -at- gmail.com.
Last modified May 2, 2008.