S04E02 - Programming with AI - with Simon Willison
From Half Stack Data Science by Half Stack Data Science
March 31, 2025 · 50 min · Season 4 · Episode 2
About this episode
In this episode, Simon Willison discusses his work on open source tools for data journalism and his insights on AI models.
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…
People in this episode
Guest: Simon Willison
Topics covered
- AI
- data journalism
- open source
- programming
Keywords
- Datasette
- SQLite
- Django
- code generation
Mentioned in this episode
Products: Datasette, SQLite, the Django Web Framework, Django
Books & works: The Well-Grounded Data Analyst, the-well-grounded-data-analyst
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