Simon Willison

On June 12, 2002, during his first year studying computer science at the University of Bath, Willison started his blog. It was first hosted on the university’s student web space and moved in September 2002 to a domain of Incutio, his part-time employer at the time.⁠[1]

In September 2002 he released IXR, the Incutio library for XML-RPC in PHP, one of his earliest open source library releases; it later lived on in both WordPress and Drupal.⁠[1]

On March 25, 2003 he released document.getElementsBySelector(), a JavaScript function that took a CSS selector and returned all matching elements. Looking back in 2022, he wrote that it was part of John Resig’s inspiration for the first version of jQuery.⁠[1]

In May 2003 Adrian Holovaty posted about a web developer job at the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas. Willison’s UK university offered a “year in industry” placement that allowed him to work for a year anywhere in the world, and he and Holovaty worked out a year-long arrangement.⁠[1]

In August 2003 the computer science student from England arrived in Lawrence to begin a year-long industrial placement at the Lawrence Journal-World. He joined Holovaty as a web developer working on KUSports, LJWorld and Lawrence.com, using PostgreSQL, Python, mod_python, Red Hat and Apache.⁠[2][3]

At the newspaper he and Holovaty decided to use Python instead of PHP to build a CMS for the local paper, which they called “the CMS” at first. In fall 2003 the two World Online developers began extracting a generic web development framework from their work; in summer 2005 World Online decided to open-source it as Django.⁠[1][4]

Willison left the Lawrence Journal-World in 2004, after which the team there grew the framework much further. On July 17, 2005 he introduced Django on his blog.⁠[1]

In September 2005 Willison joined Yahoo!YahooYahoo is an internet brand founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in 1994, with email, search, news, finance, sports, and advertising businesses. It developed from a web directory into a portal, underwent major acquisitions and security incidents, and sold its operating business in 2017, when the original listed company became Altaba. Apollo-managed funds acquired the brand’s operating business in 2021. Yahoo launched the AI answer service Scout in 2026.Open the full entry’s new Technology Development group, with a first assignment on the Flickr team. In January 2007 he left Yahoo! and went freelance.⁠[5]

From late 2006 he promoted OpenID, writing posts, making screencasts and giving conference talks in favour of an open, decentralized approach to sign-in; in 2022 he wrote that it did not end up taking off.⁠[1]

He freelanced for about a year and a half, covering technical writing, public speaking, Django, OpenID and JavaScript, and worked with a team at GCap.⁠[6]

On August 22, 2008 Willison announced that he would join the Guardian in mid-October, working four days a week as a software architect on API projects with its development team.⁠[6]

He described it as his first proper data journalism role. In March 2009 the Guardian launched the Datablog (also known as the Data Store) and its Open Platform API; the Datablog shared the data behind stories and started out on Google Sheets.⁠[1]

After the UK released Members of Parliament’s expense reports in 2009, he worked on the Guardian’s crowdsourcing project, his biggest data journalism project there, which recruited readers to dig through tens of thousands of pages of PDFs for stories; round one launched in June and round two in December. He wrote that it was “one of the projects I’m most proud of in my career so far.”⁠[1]

On June 5, 2010 Willison married Natalie Downe; the two quit their jobs to travel and, by the time they reached Casablanca, Morocco, had launched the conference directory Lanyrd together. It went live in August 2010 and let users sign in with Twitter to see conferences their friends were speaking at or attending.⁠[1]

Over the next three years Lanyrd went through Y Combinator, raised a seed round, moved to London and hired a team.⁠[1]

On September 3, 2013 Eventbrite announced its first acquisitions: London-based Lanyrd and the Argentine ticketing company Eventioz. Lanyrd had served nearly 40,000 events in 148 countries, and its team was to relocate to Eventbrite’s San Francisco headquarters.⁠[7]

At Eventbrite Willison became an engineering director. The Lanyrd site was later shut down.⁠[8][1]

Running a startup and then working at Eventbrite left an almost seven-year gap in his blogging, which he ended in October 2017.⁠[1]

On November 13, 2017 he shipped the first release of the open source tool Datasette. He wrote that it was inspired by the Guardian Datablog, combined with the realization that Zeit Now (now VercelVercelVercel is a cloud application development and deployment company founded by Guillermo Rauch in 2015 as ZEIT. It contributes to the open-source React framework Next.js and provides application hosting, deployment and runtime services; its products later expanded to AI SDK, v0 and infrastructure for AI applications. The company adopted its current name in 2020 and raised a $300 million Series F in 2025.Open the full entry) made it possible to bundle data in a SQLite database and deploy it as an exploratory application almost for free.⁠[1]

Datasette is a tool for exploring and publishing data that turns data of any shape into an interactive website and accompanying API, aimed at data journalists, museum curators, archivists, local governments, scientists and researchers. As of November 2026 its ecosystem included 44 tools and 154 plugins.⁠[9]

In February 2019 he released sqlite-utils, a Python library and command-line tool for building and working with SQLite databases.⁠[1]

On May 1, 2019 he announced that he had been accepted for a ten-month John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship (JSK) at StanfordStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry, working on “Improving the impact of investigative stories by expanding the open-source ecosystem of tools that allows journalists to share the underlying data.”⁠[10]

In late 2019 he left Eventbrite to begin the fellowship. Since then he has mostly worked full-time on Datasette and associated projects, unpaid after the fellowship ended.⁠[1]

In February 2021 he joined the VaccinateCA effort to crowdsource a database of vaccination locations and availability in California, building a fresh Django application for it; Django SQL Dashboard spun out of that work.⁠[1]

Willison has served on the board of directors of the Python Software Foundation since the 2022–2023 term and remained on the 2026–2027 board; he sat on the Finance Committee in 2023–2024 and on the PyCon US Committee in 2025–2026 and 2026–2027.⁠[11]

On September 12, 2022, after Riley Goodside showed that malicious inputs could make GPT-3 ignore its previous directions, Willison wrote that this was a form of security exploit: “I propose that the obvious name for this should be prompt injection.”⁠[12]

In April 2023 he joined the first cohort of GitHub’s open source accelerator with Datasette and related projects, a ten-week program for 20 projects in which GitHub paid participants.⁠[5][8]

On May 18, 2023 he released llm, ttok and strip-tags, command-line tools for working with ChatGPT and other large language models; in July 2023 LLM gained support for self-hosted language models via plugins. LLM grew into a command-line tool and Python library for interacting with large language models.⁠[13]

In 2023–2024 Mozilla supported his work through its MIECO program.⁠[8]

Willison works full-time building open source tools for data journalism built around Datasette and SQLite. He does one day of work a week for Prime Radiant, Jesse Vincent’s applied AI research lab; part of the work on Datasette Cloud is sponsored by Fly.io; and he is a GitHub Star, an unpaid position.⁠[8]

He states that he has not accepted payments from LLM vendors but is frequently invited to preview new products from organizations including OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry, AnthropicAnthropicAnthropic is an artificial intelligence research and product company founded in 2021 that develops the Claude models, assistant, and tools such as Claude Code, and operates as a public benefit corporation. Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei are its co-founders, and its research covers model safety, interpretability, and steerability.Open the full entry, Gemini and Mistral, often with free API credits; the one exception is that OpenAI paid him for his time at a GPT-5 preview. Since February 2026 he has accepted weekly sponsorship of his blog and newsletter, which he says has no influence on editorial content.⁠[8]

Personal website: https://simonwillison.net/ (opens in a new window).⁠[8]

X: Public account: https://x.com/simonw (opens in a new window).⁠[8]

Datasette: Official website: https://datasette.io/ (opens in a new window).⁠[9]