Simon Willison is Creator of Datasette, an open source tool for exploring and publishing data, and works full-time building open source tools for data journalism.

Simon co-created the Django web framework in 2003-2004 while working at the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper and graduated from the University of Bath in 2005. He co-founded Lanyrd, a Y Combinator funded social conference directory, in 2010 which was acquired by Eventbrite in 2013.

Simon coined the term prompt injection in September 2022, describing a critical security vulnerability affecting LLMs. He has been serving as a board member of the Python Software Foundation since 2022 and is a 2020 graduate of the JSK journalism fellowship at Stanford.

Datasette participated in the GitHub Accelerator program and receives sponsorship from Fly.io for development work. Simon served as an engineering director at Eventbrite before becoming an independent open source developer.

Django powers major platforms like Instagram and Pinterest, while Datasette has grown into a comprehensive ecosystem of tools with over 936 GitHub repositories and plugins. Simon has been blogging about web development since 2002 and is a prominent voice on AI and LLM applications.