Simon Willison: My career in side projects and open source

Simon Willison realized recently that his entire career had been shaped by side projects - from running an online gaming tournament that lead to a job in the first dot-com boom to co-founding a startup with his wife Natalie on a honeymoon that took them through Y Combinator and an acquisition. Here he talks about the lessons he learned along the way and how they are influencing Datasette, his most ambitious side project yet.

Simon Willison is the creator of Datasette, an open source tool for exploring and publishing data. He recently completed a JSK journalism fellowship at Stanford, during which he focused on building open source tools for journalism based on his experience working as a data journalist at the UK's Guardian newspaper.

Prior to the fellowship, Simon was an engineering director at Eventbrite. Simon joined Eventbrite through their acquisition of Lanyrd, a Y Combinator funded company he co-founded in 2010.