Simon Willison

Simon Willison is a British software developer, independent open-source contributor, and the co-creator of the Django web framework. Born in January 1981, he studied at the University of Bath and began his career in 2000 as a webmaster at Gameplay. In 2003 he joined the Lawrence Journal-World in Kansas on a year-long internship, where he and Adrian Holovaty created Django to streamline newsroom web development. After graduating in 2005 he joined Yahoo's Technology Development team, then in 2008 became a software architect at The Guardian. In 2010 he co-founded Lanyrd, a social conference directory backed by Y Combinator, which was acquired by Eventbrite in 2013 where he rose to Engineering Director. Since leaving Eventbrite he has worked full-time as an independent open-source developer building tools for data journalism. He created Datasette (2017), an open-source tool for exploring and publishing SQLite data; sqlite-utils, a CLI and Python library for manipulating SQLite databases; and LLM (2023), a command-line tool and Python library for accessing large language models. He coined the term 'prompt injection' in 2022 to describe a critical class of LLM security vulnerabilities. Willison is a Python Software Foundation board member (since 2022), a GitHub Star, and a participant in the GitHub Accelerator program (2023). He is based in Half Moon Bay, California.