Simon Willison

TWENTY YEARS OF BLOGGING TURNED INTO AN AI FIELD LOG

Willison has blogged since 2002, co-created Django, built Datasette, and turned his long-running site into the generative-AI boom's most obsessive independent field log — with his own command-line LLM tooling to run the experiments.

1. 2002

   THE BLOG STARTS BEFORE SOCIAL MEDIA EATS THE WEB

   Willison began publishing his personal weblog in 2002, creating the durable independent publishing surface he still uses to document technology.

   SOURCES: Simon Willisonfirst-party

2. Jul 17, 2005

   DJANGO GOES OPEN SOURCE

   Willison and Adrian Holovaty open-sourced Django, the web framework they had developed for newsroom applications.

   SOURCES: Simon Willisonfirst-party

3. Sep 8, 2010

   A CONFERENCE DIRECTORY THAT ENDS UP INSIDE EVENTBRITE

   Willison and Natalie Downe launched Lanyrd, a social conference directory that later became part of Eventbrite.

   SOURCES: Simon Willisonfirst-party

4. Nov 2017

   DATASETTE TURNS DATABASES INTO PUBLISHABLE OBJECTS

   Willison released Datasette, an open-source tool for exploring and publishing structured data on the web.

   SOURCES: Simon Willisonfirst-party

5. Jun 12, 2022

   TWENTY YEARS OF NOT LETTING THE BLOG DIE

   Willison marked two decades of continuous personal publishing, an unusually durable base for the AI chronicle that followed.

   SOURCES: Simon Willisonfirst-party

6. Apr 4, 2023

   THE BLOGGER BUILDS HIS OWN COMMAND LINE FOR LLMS

   Willison released an early version of his LLM command-line tool for interacting with language models and logging experiments locally.

   SOURCES: Simon Willisonfirst-party