HackerReposA FIELD GUIDE TO OPEN SOURCE
ProSponsor the shelf♧ 0
← Back to top all-time
simonw
simonwillisonblog
Python2017–2026
simonw / simonwillisonblog

simonwillisonblog

The source code behind my blog

Web Development
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
3Distinct people
14Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
433GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

The source code behind my blog

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year14 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2017-12-02 17:10:51 UTC to 2026-05-29 15:40:24 UTC.

0123452017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20172018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404

What Hacker News says

14 sources
simonw·Feb 7, 2026
The problem with naming my consulting clients that some of them won't want to be named. I don't want to turn down paid work because I have a popular blog. I have a very strong policy that I won't write about someone because they paid me to do so, or asked me to as part of a consulting engagement. I guess you'll just have to trust me that I'll hold to that. I like to hope I've earned the trust of most of my readers. I do have a structural conflict, which is one of the reasons my disclosures page exists. I don't value things like early access enough to avoid writing critically about companies, but the risk of subtle bias is always there. I can live with that, and I trust my readers can live with it too. I've found myself in a somewhat strange position where my hobby - blogging about stuff I find interesting - has somehow grown to the point
Read the rest
that I'm effectively single-handedly running an entire news agency covering the world's most valuable industry. As a side-project. I could commit to this full-time and adopt full professional journalist ethics - no accepted credits, no free travel etc. I'd still have to solve the revenue side of things, and if I wrote full time I'd give up being a practitioner which would damage my ability to credibly cover the space. Part of the reason people trust me is that I'm an active developer and user of these tools. On top of that, some people default to believing that the only reason anyone would write anything positive about AI is if they were being paid to do so. Convincing those people otherwise is a losing battle, and I'm trying to learn not to engage. So I'm OK with my disclosures and principles as they stand. They may not get a 100% pure score from everyone, but they're enough to satisfy my own personal ethics. I have just added disclosures links to the footer to make them easier to find - thanks for the prod on that: https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog/commit/95291fd26...
In Software factories and the agentic moment
simonw·Jan 12, 2026
Code doesn't bother me as much, because it's not claiming to be the opinions of the person who wrote it. My problem is LLMs making statements on people's behalf as if they represent the position of that person. Your example of my writing there isn't LLM generated. Did you get caught out by the em-dash? That's thanks to this 10+ year old string replacement: https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog/blob/b8066f870a9... The only LLM writing on my blog is from when VS Code or Apple Notes occasionally help complete a sentence for me.
In Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
simonw·Nov 22, 2025
I hadn't looked at my feed subscriber stats in a while, turns out I had around 6,000 at the start of 2025 and I'm up to around 12,000 now - very healthy! I use my own server-side tracking to count them - I look out for the user-agent from feed software like Feedly and pull the number out of it: Feedly/1.0 (+https://feedly.com/poller.html; 694 subscribers; ) Here's my code for that: https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog/blob/main/feedst...
In Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?
simonw·Dec 2, 2017
If you're already on Python 3, upgrading from Django 1.11 to Django 2 is pretty much the same amount of work as upgrading from 1.10 to 1.11 was. The "2" in the version here reflects the dropping of support for Python 2, and the switching over to a new versioning scheme: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.0/internals/release-proc... If you need to upgrade from Python 2 to Python 3 it will likely be a fair amount of work. In case it's useful, here's what I did to upgrade my blog (a pretty simple application, though one that's been around for a long time and survived a lot of different Django versions): https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog/pull/10
In Django 2.0 released

MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

A few shortcuts

/
Search the collection
?
Open this guide
Esc
Close dialogs and navigation

Your saved repositories and interests stay in this browser.