Simon Willison

Career

Simon Willison co-created the Django web framework and in 2010 co-founded Lanyrd, which Eventbrite later acquired; Willison then worked at Eventbrite as an engineering director. Willison has since worked as an independent open-source developer, building tools for data journalism around Datasette and SQLite.¹

Willison serves on the board of directors of the Python Software Foundation, and the PSF's board page also lists Willison on its PyCon US Committee. Willison's disclosures note one day a week of work for Prime Radiant, an applied AI research lab.¹⁵

Open-source work

Willison shipped the first public version of Datasette in November 2017 as a tool for creating and publishing JSON APIs for SQLite databases. It has since grown into a tool for exploring data and publishing it as an interactive website.⁶⁷³

LLM began as an initial prototype release on 1 April 2023 and is now a command-line utility and Python library for running prompts against large language models from many providers.⁸⁴

Writing

Willison has blogged about web development and programming at simonwillison.net since 2002. The weblog mixes longer entries with links, quotations, notes, and guide chapters, and much recent writing covers large language models and coding agents. A newsletter version goes out about once a week, with a shorter monthly briefing for sponsors.¹²

Work and contributions

• Simon Willison's Weblog Show, channel or publication

  Writes the blog's entries, links, quotations, notes, and guides on programming and large language models, plus a weekly-ish newsletter edition of the blog.²¹

• Datasette Open-source code

  Created Datasette, an open-source tool for exploring data and publishing it as an interactive website and API.¹³

• LLM Open-source code

  Created LLM, a command-line utility and Python library for interacting with large language models.⁴¹

Timeline

1. 2002Began writing about web development and programming at simonwillison.net.¹
2. 2010Co-founded Lanyrd, later acquired by Eventbrite.¹
3. Nov 13, 2017Shipped the first public version of Datasette.⁶
4. Apr 1, 2023Released version 0.1 of the LLM command-line tool as an initial prototype.⁸

Other documented roles

Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.

• Engineering director, Eventbrite¹
• Co-founder (2010); later joined Eventbrite through its acquisition of Lanyrd, Lanyrd¹

Where they work

• Simon Willison's Weblog 1 person in the wiki
• Datasette 1 person in the wiki
• Python Software Foundation 1 person in the wiki

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