Simon Willison
Simon Willison is the creator of Datasette, an open source tool for exploring and publishing data. He currently works full-time developing open source tools for data journalism, built around Datasette and SQLite.
Simon has spent the last year and a half deeply immersed in the world of Large Language Models, trying to solve the fascinating problems of how to responsibly use the technology in the two fields he knows best: journalism and software engineering.
Prior to becoming an independent open source developer, 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.
He is a board member of the Python Software Foundation and a co-creator of the Django Web Framework, and has been blogging about web development and programming since 2002 at https://simonwillison.net/
simonw
Session
Plugins offer a powerful way to extend software packages. Tools that support a plugin architecture include WordPress, Jupyter, VS Code and pytest - each of which benefits from an enormous array of plugins adding all kinds of new features and expanded capabilities.
Adding plugin support to an open source project can greatly reduce the friction involved in attracting new contributors. Users can work independently and even package and publish their work without needing to directly coordinate with the project's core maintainers. As a maintainer this means you can wake up one morning and your software grew new features without you even having to review a pull request!
There's one catch: information on how to design and implement plugin support for a project is scarce.
I now have three major open source projects that support plugins, with over 200 plugins published across those projects. I'll talk about everything I've learned along the way: when and how to use plugins, how to design plugin hooks and how to ensure your plugin authors have as good an experience as possible.