Simon Willison

Simon Willison is an independent open-source developer based in San Francisco who builds Datasette, a tool for exploring and publishing data, LLM, a command-line tool and Python library for working with large language models, and sqlite-utils, along with hundreds of smaller tools and plugins. He is also co-creator of the Django web framework.

Earlier he co-founded Lanyrd, a conference directory that was acquired by Eventbrite, where he then worked as an engineering director. Since leaving he has worked independently on his open-source ecosystem, funded through GitHub Sponsors, a sponsor-only monthly digest of LLM news and, from 2026, blog sponsorships.

Willison's weblog has become one of the most cited independent sources on practical use of LLMs, and he is known for publishing detailed notes on nearly everything he builds and learns. He serves on the board of the Python Software Foundation.