Inspiring Persons: Simon Willison
You are reading this post on my own website thanks to the inspiration of Simon Willison.
He is the one who inspired me to get my own site up and running and publish here instead of relying (only) on social media platforms. His personal website, simonwillison.net, nicely demonstrates the value of owning your digital narrative and sharing knowledge freely.
Simon Willison is the creator of Datasette, an open source tool for exploring and publishing data. He currently works full-time building open source tools for data journalism, built around Datasette and SQLite.
Prior to becoming an independent open source developer, Simon was an engineering director at Eventbrite. Simon joined Eventbrite through their acquisition of Lanyrd, a Y Combinator funded company he co-founded in 2010.
He is a co-creator of the Django Web Framework, and has been blogging about web development and programming since 2002 at simonwillison.net.
Source: Simon Willison’s About Page
Inspiration for Coding and Learning
Beyond inspiring me to build my own platform, Simon is also an exceptional coder. His dedication inspires me to write better code and continue coding myself, even as my career progresses and coding is expected less and less.
I particularly appreciate how he shares his deep dives into Large Language Models (his pelican on a bike tests are real fun!), practical coding techniques, and technology trends. These provide really good insight and overview, and inspire me to experiment and build things myself.
Contributing to the Common Good
I also appreciate his commitment to helping the common good. His Datasette tooling and workshops for the press are a great example of using technology to benefit everyone.
Overall, Simon Willison’s technical expertise, commitment to open source, and focus on the common good make him an inspiring person!
