Simon Willison is a British programmer, co-founder of the social conference directory Lanyrd, and co-creator of the Django Web framework.

Willison started his professional web development in 2000 as a web master and developer for the UK based website Gameplay, where he was instrumental in creating File Monster, a large games related file download site.

In 2003–2004, whilst working at the Lawrence Journal-World[3] during an industrial placement year, he and other web developers (Adrian Holovaty, Jacob Kaplan-Moss and Wilson Miner[4]) created Django, an open source web application framework for Python.

After graduating in 2005, Willison worked on Yahoo's Technology Development team and on very early versions of the Fire Eagle Internet geolocation service.

[5] In late 2010, he launched the social conference directory Lanyrd with his wife and co-founder, Natalie Downe.