Simon Willison is a British

programmer A computer programmer, sometimes referred to as a software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder, is a person who creates computer programs — often for larger computer software. A programmer is someone who writes/creates ...

, 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 Django ( ; sometimes stylized as django) is a free and open-source, Python-based web framework that follows the model–template–views (MTV) architectural pattern. It is maintained by the Django Software Foundation (DSF), an independent orga ...

and is a frequent public speaker. Currently (November 2022) he is working on the

Datasette The third, most common version of the 1530 C2N Datassette The Commodore 1530 (C2N) Datasette, later also Datassette (a portmanteau of ''data'' and ''cassette''), is Commodore's dedicated magnetic tape data storage device. Using compact cassette ...

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 software, free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in PHP, hypertext preprocessor language and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported secure hypert ...

and

Drupal Drupal () is a free and open-source web content management system (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Drupal provides an open-source back-end framework for at least 14% of the top 10,000 websites worldwid ...

). 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 softwa ...

. 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 provid ...

. In 2003–2004, whilst working at the ''Lawrence Journal-World'' during an industrial placement year, he and other web developers (

Adrian Holovaty Adrian is a form of the Latin given name Adrianus or Hadrianus. Its ultimate origin is most likely via the former river Adria from the Venetic and Illyrian word ''adur'', meaning "sea" or "water". The Adria was until the 8th century BC the main ...

, Jacob Kaplan-Moss and Wilson Miner) created Django, an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

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 and ...

for Python. 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. (2017–present), Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds ma ...

'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 geogr ...

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 A newspaper is a periodical publication containing written information about current events and is often typed in black ink with a white or gray background. Newspapers can cover a wide ...

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

with his wife and co-founder,

Natalie Downe Natalie may refer to: People * Natalie (given name) * Natalie (singer) (born 1979), Mexican-American R&B singer/songwriter * Shahan Natalie (1884–1983), Armenian writer and principal organizer of Operation Nemesis Music Albums * ''Nat ...

. 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, Str ...

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