Yaron Koren
Yaron Koren
About me: I founded and run a MediaWiki consulting company, WikiWorks. I also do some development for the Wikipedia Usability Initiative. In 2007 I believe I was the only freelance semantic-wiki developer in the world. I live in New York City; 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.
Current interests
- Semantic wikis - These days I do exclusively MediaWiki development and consulting, mostly based around the Semantic MediaWiki plugin, which I think is world-changing. 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).
- Battlestar Galactica - respect.
- Jean-Michel Basquiat - the greatest?
- Español - I'm trying to learn Spanish at the moment.
- 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
In reverse chronological order:
Recommended books
Don't you want to see a list of books you should read if you want to get into software development?
Programming languages
- The C Programming Language, Kernighan and Ritchie - okay, it's on this list mostly for nostalgia's sake, really.
- Programming Perl, Larry Wall et al. - when there are no answers, Perl is the answer.
- Programming Ruby, Dave Thomas et al. - still my favorite programming language, in theory.
- Agile Web Development with Rails, Thomas, Hansson et al. - did Rails hit its peak in 2006? I don't know, but it's still good.
Interface design
- 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.
Software management
- 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.
History
- 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.
My other pages
Random stuff
Family
You can contact me at yaron57 -at- gmail.com.
Last modified December 16, 2009.
