Half Stack Data Science31 Mar 2025

S04E02 - Programming with AI - with Simon Willison

In this episode we talked to Simon Willison.

Simon is the creator of Datasette, an open source tool for exploring and publishing data. He currently works full-time building open source tools for data journalism, built around Datasette and SQLite.

Prior to becoming an independent open source developer, Simon was an engineering director at Eventbrite. Simon joined Eventbrite through their acquisition of Lanyrd, a Y Combinator funded company he co-founded in 2010.

He is a co-creator of the Django Web Framework, and has been blogging about web development and programming since 2002 at simonwillison.net

We talked to Simon about his goal of building tools for data journalists, what he's learned about tinkering with, and writing about, AI models for years, his excitement about their code-generating capabilities, how to get the most out of all of these tools, and what generative AI tools have to do with pelicans.

You can find Simon at https://simonwillison.net

Please enjoy our conversation with Simon Willison!

David's book, The Well-Grounded Data Analyst is out! ⁠https://www.manning.com/books/the-well-grounded-data-analyst⁠

If you want to find out more, we have a whole episode about it: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/episode/5D0iDtQRh3tWiIhokrjz3x?si=AiX6YyRET16lnzXDlvdcfw

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