https://talkingpostgres.com/episodes/ai-for-data-engineers-with-simon-willison

Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano

Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano

Home Episodes People Subscribe
Home Episodes People Subscribe

AI for data engineers with Simon Willison

August 8, 2025 / 01:15:58/E30 Download MP3
Show Notes / Transcript
It's always a good day if you see a pelican. In Episode 30 of Talking
Postgres with Claire Giordano, open source developer Simon Willison
--creator of Datasette and co-creator of Django--joins to explore how
AI is useful for data engineers today. We move past the hype and
boosterism to dig into example after example: structured data
extraction, alt text and accessibility, safety and security (aka the
fiddly bits), and why Postgres's fine-grained permissions are such a
good fit for AI-powered workflows. Also: Pulitzer-worthy data
tooling, the science fiction of the 10X engineer, agents, MCP, RAG,
the multitude of models, and why Simon spends so many waking hours on
the jagged frontier of AI.

Links mentioned in this episode:

  * Blog: Simon Willison's Weblog
  * Blog: Simon's Willison's TIL - Things I've Learned
  * Podcast episode: Working in public on open source with Simon
    Willison and Marco Slot
  * Project page: Django Web Framework
  * Project page: Datasette, for finding stories in data 
  * GitHub repo: llm CLI tool and Python library
  * Demo: Language models on the command-line w/ Simon Willison
  * Blog post: OpenAI's new open weight (Apache 2) models are really
    good, by Simon Willison 
  * Podcast episode: Accessibility and Gen AI podcast with guest
    Simon Willison
  * Blog post: New dashboard: alt text for all my images, by Simon
    Willison 
  * Keynote talk: Big Opportunities in Small Data, by Simon Willison
    at Citus Con: An Event for Postgres 2023 
  * Blog post: How OpenElections Uses LLMs, by Derek Willis 
  * Blog posts tagged with pelican-riding-a-bicycle on Simon
    Willison's Weblog 
  * Blog post: No, AI is not Making Engineers 10x as Productive, via
    Colton Voege, featured on Simon's weblog
  * GitHub repo: pgvector extension to Postgres
  * Cal invite: LIVE recording of Ep31 of Talking Postgres to happen
    on Wed Sep 17, 2025

Creators and Guests

Claire Giordano
Host
Claire Giordano
Claire Giordano is head of the Postgres open source community
initiatives at Microsoft. Claire has served in leadership roles in
engineering, product management, and product marketing at Sun
Microsystems, Amazon/A9, and Citus Data. At Sun, Claire managed the
engineering team that created Solaris Zones, and led the effort to
open source Solaris.
     
Aaron Wislang
Producer
Aaron Wislang
Open Source Engineering + Developer Relations at Microsoft + Azure [?]
| Go (golang), Cloud Native, Linux    [?]   | Toronto  |  |
https://aaronw.dev/hello/
       
Simon Willison
Guest
Simon Willison
Independent AI researcher, creator of datasette.io and
llm.datasette.io, building open source tools for data journalism,
writing about a lot of stuff at https://simonwillison.net/
      
AI for data engineers with Simon Willison

Listen Anywhere

 Listen On Apple Podcasts  Listen On Spotify  Listen On Overcast  
Listen On Pocket Casts  Listen On Amazon Music  Listen On YouTube 
More Options >>
   (c) 2025 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Home Episodes People Subscribe
Broadcast by
|