Simon Willison
Simon Willison is a software developer whose public work connects web frameworks, inspectable data, and language-model experiments. His weblog began in 2002, and he is a co-creator of Django. In 2010, he and Natalie Downe launched Lanyrd, a conference directory; after its acquisition by Eventbrite, he worked there as an engineering director. He introduced Datasette in 2017 to help people publish and explore SQLite data. In 2022, he proposed the term prompt injection after examples shared by Riley Goodside, describing a model following hostile instructions in outside text. He later built LLM and related command-line tools for practical experiments. He continues independent data-tool work and has a one-day-a-week role at Jesse Vincent’s applied AI lab, Prime Radiant.
- Now at
- Prime Radiant
Timeline
-
2002 and early web work
Blogging and Django
Willison starts his weblog and contributes as a co-creator of Django.
-
2010 and after
Lanyrd and Eventbrite
Willison and Natalie Downe launch Lanyrd; acquisition leads to his engineering-director role at Eventbrite.
-
2017
Datasette
He introduces tools for publishing and exploring SQLite databases.
-
2022
Prompt injection
He names the problem after examples shared by Riley Goodside.
-
2023
LLM tools
Willison introduces command-line tools for prompts, response logs, tokens, and text extraction.
-
October 2026
Current work
Independent data-tool development continues alongside a weekly role at Prime Radiant.
Sources and credits
Photo: Paul Downey from Berkhamsted, UK, via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY 2.0. Source: commons.wikimedia.org. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.
_(cropped).jpg){kind=link}