Simon Willison
Open Source Developer at Simon Willison's Weblog
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSimon Willison is an open source developer and web technology storyteller with 12+ years of experience building data-focused tools and scalable web platforms from San Francisco. He’s the creator and maintainer of Datasette, a practical multi-tool for exploring and publishing data, and a frequent contributor to widely used Python projects such as the ASGI server Uvicorn where he’s implemented protocol-level improvements. Equally comfortable full-stack and backend, he’s built browser-automation tooling (shot-scraper), self-updating profile tooling, and bespoke database schema management that reflect a pragmatic, data-first engineering approach. A former Director of Architecture at Eventbrite and co-founder of Lanyrd, he combines startup instincts with newsroom-grade data journalism experience from a JSK fellowship at Stanford. He writes and speaks widely about web standards, Python, Django and crowdsourcing, and often surfaces non-obvious insights by turning tooling and automation into repeatable publishing workflows.
12 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
BSc, Computer Science, BSc, Computer Science at University of Bath
Stackoverflow
15,742reputation
4.9mreached
27answers
22questions
mongodb
top-5%
python
top-1%
datetime
top-1%
Github Skills (57)
apim10
datetime10
github-ci10
sqlite10
python10
scrape10
css10
http10
websocket10
templater10
template-engine10
webscraping10
wpgraphql10
browser-automation10
asyncio10
Programming languages (23)
Github contributions (5)
simonw/simonw
Jul 2020 - Nov 2022
https://simonwillison.net/2020/Jul/10/self-updating-profile-readme/
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:52 commits, 2 PRs, 64 pushes in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Simon primarily focused on enhancing the functionality of a self-updating profile README. They developed a Python script (`build_readme.py`) to fetch and display recent releases, blog entries, and TILs. The user integrated with GitHub's GraphQL API and various web services to retrieve data, and they also updated the README to include links to TIL website. Their commits involved API integration, data parsing, and README generation.
julupdatinggraphql
simonw/til
Apr 2020 - Jan 2023
Today I Learned
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:950 commits, 17 PRs, 1415 pushes in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Simon primarily worked on building and maintaining a TIL (Today I Learned) site. They implemented scripts for building and updating a SQLite database, generating an index for the README, and adding a search engine. Furthermore, they designed and implemented templates for displaying the TIL content, integrated an Atom feed, and integrated social media cards, while also refactoring links and improving overall design consistency.
datasettelearnedtiltoday
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