Simon Willison is a British programmer, co-founder of the social conference directory

Lanyrd Lanyrd (pronounced and named after "lanyard") was a conference directory website. It was created by Simon Willison and Natalie Downe and launched in 2010. The site was created while the couple were on honeymoon. The site compiled blog posts, p ...

, and Director of Architecture at

Eventbrite Eventbrite is an American event management and ticketing website. The service allows users to browse, create, and promote local events. The service charges a fee to event organizers in exchange for online ticketing services, unless the event is f ...

. Originating from the UK, he currently resides in San Francisco, California. Simon is a co-creator of the Django Web framework and is a frequent public speaker. Currently (November 2022) he is working on the Datasette project and other related projects.

Career

Simon started his professional web development in 2000 as a web master and developer for the UK based website Gameplay, where he was instrumental in creating File Monster, a large games related file download site. In 2001 he left to attend the

University of Bath (Virgil, Georgics II) , mottoeng = Learn the culture proper to each after its kind , established = 1886 (Merchant Venturers Technical College) 1960 (Bristol College of Science and Technology) 1966 (Bath University of Technology) 1971 (univ ...

. Whilst studying, he worked part-time for Incutio where he developed the Incutio XML-RPC Library, a popular XML-RPC library for PHP (used in

WordPress WordPress (WP or WordPress.org) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in hypertext preprocessor language and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported HTTPS. Features include a plugin architecture ...

and Drupal). During this time Simon started his web development blog. In developing the software for his blog, Simon built one of the first implementations of

pingback A pingback is one of four types of linkback methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles. Some weblog softwar ...

. Through his blog he was an early adopter and evangelist of

OpenID OpenID is an open standard and decentralized authentication protocol promoted by the non-profit OpenID Foundation. It allows users to be authenticated by co-operating sites (known as relying parties, or RP) using a third-party identity provider ...

. In 2003–2004, whilst working at the ''Lawrence Journal-World'' during an industrial placement year, he and other web developers ( Adrian Holovaty, Jacob Kaplan-Moss and Wilson Miner) created Django, an open source

web application framework A web framework (WF) or web application framework (WAF) is a software framework that is designed to support the development of web applications including web services, web resources, and web APIs. Web frameworks provide a standard way to build an ...

for

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...

. After graduating in 2005, Simon worked on

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Manage ...

's Technology Development team and on very early versions of the Fire Eagle

Internet geolocation In computing, Internet geolocation is software capable of deducing the geographic position of a device connected to the Internet. For example, the device's IP address can be used to determine the country, city, or ZIP code, determining its geogra ...

service. After Yahoo! he worked as a consultant on OpenID and web development in various publishing and media companies. Willison was hired in 2008 by the UK newspaper

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

to work as a software architect. In late 2010, he launched the social conference directory

with his wife and co-founder, Natalie Downe. They received funding from

Y Combinator Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, St ...

in early 2011. In 2013, Lanyrd was acquired by

with Simon and Natalie joining the Eventbrite engineering team in San Francisco.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Willison, Simon Living people Web developers Computer programmers Alumni of the University of Bath 1981 births