Simon Willison’s Weblog

Announcing our DjangoCon US 2024 Talks! I'm speaking at DjangoCon in Durham, NC in September.

My accepted talk title was How to design and implement extensible software with plugins. Here's my abstract:

Plugins offer a powerful way to extend software packages. Tools that support a plugin architecture include WordPress, Jupyter, VS Code and pytest - each of which benefits from an enormous array of plugins adding all kinds of new features and expanded capabilities.

Adding plugin support to an open source project can greatly reduce the friction involved in attracting new contributors. Users can work independently and even package and publish their work without needing to directly coordinate with the project's core maintainers. As a maintainer this means you can wake up one morning and your software grew new features without you even having to review a pull request!

There's one catch: information on how to design and implement plugin support for a project is scarce.

I now have three major open source projects that support plugins, with over 200 plugins published across those projects. I'll talk about everything I've learned along the way: when and how to use plugins, how to design plugin hooks and how to ensure your plugin authors have as good an experience as possible.

I'm going to be talking about what I've learned integrating Pluggy with Datasette, LLM and sqlite-utils. I've been looking for an excuse to turn this knowledge into a talk for ages, very excited to get to do it at DjangoCon!

# 17th July 2024, 3:20 am / django, djangocon, plugins, python, speaking, datasette, sqlite-utils, llm

The Zen of Python, Unix, and LLMs. Here’s the YouTube recording of my 1.5 hour conversation with Hugo Bowne-Anderson yesterday.

I fed a Whisper transcript to Google Gemini Pro 1.5 and asked it for the themes from our conversation, and it said we talked about “Python’s success and versatility, the rise and potential of LLMs, data sharing and ethics in the age of LLMs, Unix philosophy and its influence on software development and the future of programming and human-computer interaction”.

# 29th February 2024, 9:04 pm / python, speaking, my-talks, ai, whisper, llms, gemini

Data analysis with SQLite and Python. I turned my 2hr45m workshop from PyCon into the latest official tutorial on the Datasette website. It includes an extensive handout which should be useful independently of the video itself.

# 2nd July 2023, 4:48 pm / python, speaking, sqlite, my-talks, datasette

Feature Flags, from PyCon 2014. Slides from a 15 minute talk I gave at PyCon 2014 about feature flags - what they are, how to use them and how we implemented them at both Lanyrd and Eventbrite.

This was part of a longer workshop on Advanced Django Patterns from Eventbrite and Lanyrd, which I co-presented with Andrew Godwin and Nathan Yergler.

# 10th April 2014, 6:27 pm / django, pycon, python, speaking, my-talks, feature-flags

What’s coming in Django 1.2 (presentation notes). I wrote up some background notes for the talk on Django 1.2 I gave at DJUGL last week.

# 5th December 2009, 5:10 pm / django, djugl, python, speaking, my-talks

Exploring Python (via) Notes from the introduction to Python presentation I gave today at Stack Overflow DevDays Amsterdam.

# 2nd November 2009, 3:35 pm / devdays, python, speaking, stackoverflow, my-talks

Django snippets: Orderable inlines using drag and drop with jQuery UI. Code example from my PyCon tutorial on customising the Django admin interface.

# 13th September 2008, 12:19 pm / django, django-admin, dragndrop, jquery, pyconuk, pyconuk2008, python, snippets, sortable, speaking, my-talks, tutorials

Django Master Class. Notes and slides from the OSCON tutorial I gave yesterday with Jacob Kaplan-Moss and Jeremy Dunck.

# 24th July 2007, 3:20 pm / django, jacob-kaplan-moss, jeremy-dunck, oscon, oscon07, python, speaking, my-talks, tutorial

The Django Web Application Framework. I’m slowly pushing my presentations from the past couple of years up to Slideshare. This is a Django talk from April 2006, so it’s a little out of date.

# 5th July 2007, 1:07 am / accu, django, python, slides, slideshare, speaking, my-talks