Yaron Koren

About me: I founded and run a MediaWiki consulting company, WikiWorks. I also wrote the MediaWiki reference book Working with MediaWiki. I live in New York City with my lovely wife. I've lived all around the city for the last 11 years or so, and before that I got my undergraduate degree at MIT. I grew up in Haifa, Israel, and then Amherst, MA.

My (basically abandoned) weblog.

Current interests

• These days I do exclusively MediaWiki development and consulting, mostly based around the Semantic MediaWiki extension, which I think is world-changing. To be honest, I don't have many interests beyond that at the moment. I've created a whole bunch of extensions around it, among them Semantic Forms (the best-known one), which allows for the creation of collaborative, form-based structured data; Semantic Drilldown, which provides an interface for browsing that data; and External Data, which can retrieve information from external APIs. See an explanation of all the Semantic MediaWiki extensions, and a biography of my MediaWiki development career. And you can also read two of my relevant blog posts - "Semantic wikis are the future of information" (from December 2007) and "Semantic wikis are the future of systems integration" (from May 2009).
• Español - I'm also learning Spanish.
• 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.

Sites I've created

• WikiWorks - my company.
• Referata - a hosting site for Semantic MediaWiki-based wikis.
• Discourse DB - co-created in 2006 with Nick Grandy; it was the basis, in one way or another, for most of the work I've done since then. In my opinion, it was the first true wiki database, though others might disagree.
• Betocracy - my (mostly) solo project, which let users create their own prediction markets. It's defunct - see here for why.
• NewYorkNabes, the renter's guide to New York City neighborhoods - I programmed it; it's also defunct now.
• Computer Arithmetic Algorithms Simulator - a site I created for my dad. I did most of the layout and some of the programming.

Recommended books

Here are some books that have influenced me a lot, in the field of software development and in general:

• 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 probably 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 - talent and experience usually aren't as important as enjoyment of the task and the desire to see it finished.
• The Cash Nexus, Niall Ferguson - the most irrational mass behaviors usually have a financial explanation.
• The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb - sadly, understanding the past doesn't mean we can predict the future.