Half Stack Data Science

← Half Stack Data Science31 Mar 2025 · 50 min

S04E02 - Programming with AI - with Simon Willison

S04E02 - Programming with AI - with Simon Willison31 Mar 202550 min

<p>In this episode we talked to Simon Willison. </p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>He is a co-creator of the Django Web Framework, and has been blogging about web development and programming since 2002 at simonwillison.net</p><p>We talked to Simon about his goal of building tools for data journalists, what he&#39;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.</p><p>You can find Simon at <a href="https://simonwillison.net" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">https://simonwillison.net</a></p><p>Please enjoy our conversation with Simon Willison!</p><p>--</p><p>David&#39;s book, The Well-Grounded Data Analyst is out! <a href="https://www.manning.com/books/the-well-grounded-data-analyst">⁠https://www.manning.com/books/the-well-grounded-data-analyst⁠</a></p><p>If you want to find out more, we have a whole episode about it: <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/5D0iDtQRh3tWiIhokrjz3x?si=AiX6YyRET16lnzXDlvdcfw">⁠https://open.spotify.com/episode/5D0iDtQRh3tWiIhokrjz3x?si=AiX6YyRET16lnzXDlvdcfw</a></p>