Simon Willison’s Weblog

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8 items tagged “personalnews”

2023

GitHub Accelerator: our first cohort. I’m participating in the first cohort of GitHub’s new open source accelerator program, with Datasette (and related projects). It’s a 10 week program with 20 projects working together “with an end goal of building durable streams of funding for their work”. # 13th April 2023, 5:28 pm

2022

Twenty years of my blog

I started this blog on June 12th 2002—twenty years ago today! To celebrate two decades of blogging, I decided to pull together some highlights and dive down a self-indulgent nostalgia hole.

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2021

Trying to end the pandemic a little earlier with VaccinateCA

This week I got involved with the VaccinateCA effort. We are trying to end the pandemic a little earlier, by building the most accurate database possible of vaccination locations and availability in California.

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2019

My JSK Fellowship: Building an open source ecosystem of tools for data journalism

I started a new chapter of my career last week: I began a year long fellowship with the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships program at Stanford.

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2010

Getting married and going travelling

It’s been a busy month. On Saturday the 5th of June I married the wonderful Natalie Downe in a beautiful ceremony at Roedean School in Brighton. The reception had owls, cheese, a ferret, a golden eagle, amazing Turkish food, Jewish chair dancing and lovely guests. It was the happiest day of my life.

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2008

Back to full-time employment

I’ve been freelance for a year and a half now, and it’s been a great deal of fun. For me, being freelance meant having the freedom to pursue all sorts of different interests—technical writing, public speaking, Django, OpenID, JavaScript—and the opportunity to work with some really fantastic people.

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2005

Working for Yahoo!

I guess it’s about time I blogged this: Monday was my first official day working for Yahoo! I’ve joined the new Technology Development group, first mentioned by Jeremy Zawodny a couple of months ago. My first assignment is with the Flickr team, where I will be working on some Cool New Stuff. How exciting is that?

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2003

I’m in Kansas

If you’ve been wondering why the site has been so quiet for the past few days, here’s the reason: I’ve moved to the States! To cut a long story short, I’m here in sunny Lawrence for a couple of weeks preparing for a year long industrial placement at the Lawrence Journal-World, which should start for real in October (depending on my Visa application). To call this an exciting opportunity would be an understatement. The team I’m working with have won a ton of awards, and have a fearsome reputation within the industry. I’m joining Adrian Holovaty (recently interviewed on zlog) as a web developer working on KUSports, LJWorld and the excellent Lawrence.com. The company itself is remarkably forward thinking, especially in its approach to the web (no need to support Netscape 4)—there’s a good overview of what makes the Journal World special here, which includes a video interview with my boss, Rob Curley.

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