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Simon Willison - Data Journalism, The Importance of Side Projects #74

Develomentor

English - July 16, 2020 04:00 - 48 minutes - 33 MB - ★★★★★ - 30 ratings
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Simon Willison.

Simon Willison is a JSK Journalism Fellow. When selected as a fellow he was an engineering director at Eventbrite. He originally joined Eventbrite through its acquisition of Lanyrd, a Y Combinator-funded company he co-founded in 2010. Simon has made huge leaps in data journalism. 

Simon is a co-creator of the Django Web Framework. He has also been blogging about web development, programming and data journalism since 2002 at simonwillison.net.

Simon is the creator of Datasette, a new tool for publishing structured data as a web API. Datasette is based on Simon’s experiences working as a data journalist at the Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom. One of Simon’s projects included the Guardian’s crowdsourcing application for analyzing expense claims by members of Parliament.

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Quotes

These days python is used for data science. None of that tooling existed back then. The website of python was very nascent. People were still figuring out ‘whats the best way to build things with python‘?

You can use software engineering skills to help tell stories and to help break the news. 

“My wife and I got married in 2010 and we decided that we’d quit our jobs and go off traveling as long as we could. We’d take laptops and see if there were freelancing clients we could work with.”  

—Simon Willison

Additional Resources

What is a content management system (CMS)? – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb8MkRr9gu0

One of Simon’s side projects Owls Near Me – https://www.owlsnearme.com/

Learn more about the Django Project – https://www.djangoproject.com/

The Pendulum Approach – by Charity Majors – https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pendulum-or-the-ladder/

Charity Majors on Develomentor – https://develomentor.com/2020/06/18/charity-majors-systems-engineer-cofounder-of-honeycomb-io-66/

Check out Simon’s newest side project Datasette – https://github.com/simonw/datasette

The Manager’s path – https://www.amazon.com/Managers-Path-Leaders-Navigating-Growth/dp/1491973897

Ask a manager blog – https://www.askamanager.org/

You can find more resources in the show notes
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To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/

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