Episode 4: with Jessica Tegner

We interviewed Jessica Tegner from Denmark to hear about her journey in technology, from modding Minecraft games into becoming an open source maintainer.

Playing video games like Minecraft led her to learn programming and to solve problems with coding and technology. She lost her vision in 2018, but it does not stop her from continuing to tinker with tools and technology. In fact, it motivates her into creating and improving tools to be more accessible to the users.

Jessica is the maintainer of the popular PyPandoc library, which is a Python wrapper for the Pandoc library. She was selected as the first cohort of the GitHub Accelerator program.

Jessica has spoken at several conferences but aspires to do more, and especially at Python conferences. She wishes that events and conferences would have more accessibility information openly available.

Be sure to listen to the episode to learn all about Jessica’s inspiring story!

Topic discussed

• Introductions
• Playing video games as a child
• Starting a Minecraft server which turns into one of the biggest server in Denmark
• Learning to mod Minecraft server which in turns brings up her love for programming
• Using Python to program desktop applications
• Becoming the maintainer for PyPandoc
• Difficulties and challenges while coding with visual impairment
• Her superpower: being able to read twice as fast as an average human reader
• Contributing to Poetry
• Why Minecraft is an example of an accessible video game
• Accessibility information at conferences, and advice to conference organizers
• Thoughts on AI and ChatGPT for computer science students
• Her favorite tools, like screen reader, accessible browser, and IDE
• Traveling
• Making her own video game engine because the existing engines are not accessible
• Her aspirations to speak at more Python conferences

Links from the show

• Minecraft: https://www.minecraft.net/
• PyPandoc: https://github.com/JessicaTegner/pypandoc
• Pandoc: https://www.pandoc.org/
• Poetry: https://python-poetry.org/

Get to know Jessica Tegner

Jessica Tegner

Jessica Tegner is an open source software developer and computer science student from Denmark who has been a part of the open source world for over 13 years. She is a maintainer of PyPandoc, a thin wrapper for the universal document converter pandoc. Being fully blind has not stopped her from working as a software engineer intern at Uber, being a member of the first GitHub Accelerator program or having the opportunity of being a world-conference public speaker.

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