Simon Willison

Who is Simon Willison?

Simon Willison is a programmer and co-founder of the social conference directory Lanyrd. Originating from the UK, he is also a consultant on OpenID and client- and server-side Web development, a frequent public speaker and a co-creator of the Django Web framework. Before going freelance, Simon worked on Yahoo!'s Technology Development team and on very early versions of the Fire Eagle geolocation service, and prior to that at the Lawrence Journal-World, an award winning local newspaper in Kansas.

Simon Willison was hired in 2008 by the UK newspaper The Guardian to work as a software architect.

In late 2010 he launched the social conference directory Lanyrd with his wife and co-founder, Natalie Downe. They received funding from Y Combinator in early 2011. In 2013, Lanyrd was acquired by Eventbrite with Simon and his wife Natalie joining the Eventbrite engineering team in San Francisco.