Hi, everyone.
Welcome to PyPodcats, the Hidden
Figures of Python podcast series.
The PyPodcats is a series that is created
by me, Georgi, and here there's Cheuk, Tereza, and
Mariatta, all four of us coming together to highlight
voices from under-represented group members of the Python community.
Now we follow the PSF Code of
Conduct to help interactions and to keep
Python a positive, successful, and growing community.
If you would like to know more about the
details of the Code of Conduct, you can head
out straight onto https://pypodcats.live/conduct
A little bit of self introduction.
My name is Geogrgi and I am
hosting today live at Porto, Portugal.
Normally I'm in Amsterdam.
And to you, Cheuk.
Hi, I'm Cheuk and I live in London.
I love Python.
I am a PyLady. I don't know.
Yeah, I'm addicted to Python.
Then we have our guest today, Jessica.
Hello, Jessica.
Hello.
Yeah, so thanks for having me on, you two.
Yeah, my name is Jessica.
I'm a open source maintainer primarily
of like, different Python projects.
I am in Denmark right now, but I love
to travel and I love to go to different
conferences, mostly as a speaker, but I also really
want to just go to more as an attendee.
So I'm all over the place.
But, yeah, right now I'm in Denmark, where I live.
Super.
So actually, our first question was
to ask Jessica to describe herself.
I think she literally described herself already.
So we are going to skip the first question.
Yeah, actually, Jessica and I met in a
conference in Bilbao and she was speaking there.
So, yeah, it was my first time speaking
and I had two lovely talks there. It was great.
Wow.
So from the first time you spoke until
now, how many talks have you given?
So at physical conferences, I have done those two.
I've also done a few, done a few interviews and
I've done a few live streams with some other people,
and I'm working on a lot of different stuff that's
coming in the next weeks and next couple of months.
Well, sounds like a very busy schedule.
Yes, it is.
So let's like, rewind, rewind all
the way back to the beginning.
How did you first get in contact with a computer?
Yeah, how did I first get in contact?
Leave aside.
Yeah, I feel so old.
But then, then yet again, not really.
So how did I first get in contact with a computer?
It was like mini probably.
I lived at home.
I was, what, five or six when I
started playing video games on the computer.
I started playing age-appropriate, I want
to say age-appropriate video games.
It was age-appropriate.
Oh, I play a lot of age-
inappropriate video games when I was little.
No, but it's mostly, it's like there's a lot of
video games where people in their start scenes will play
them even though they are rated for like 16 or
18 plus, which is what I did at the time.
It's totally innocent.
Also, Jessica is very young, so like,
probably it's easier to like, have a
computer at home when you're younger.
When I say video games, when I say video games,
it was very much, it was very much like very
basic, like images on the screen, you click on things,
they do flashy things, and that's it.
It wasn't anything near as realistic as they are now.
Not Tetris.
It was like, I want to say worse than Tetris.
It was worse than Tetris level.
I said it was the Family computer on the Small,
like on the slow dial-up connections that I was.
That was great.
We all have memory of those and you
have to fight over the phone line.
You have to like ask your mom to not
use the phone while you're on the Internet.
Yeah.
The great thing was that I mainly played offline games,
so I didn't care about my mom having hour long
conversations with the rest of the family over the phone.
That is great.
Yeah, but yeah, I fell in love from the very
first moment I really got to use a computer.
They had to sometimes drag me away from it.
So how do you actually start coding?
Like writing, learning how to
program and stuff like that?
Yeah.
So now I'm really going to age myself a lot.
Honestly, it's not really a secret how old I am.
It's very out there.
So around 14 years ago, when I
was a little girl at ten years.
Old, not that old.
I know. Do the math.
I already have one midlife crisis,
so you can do the math.
I started playing a very blocky
game that many people probably know. Minecraft.
Oh, yeah.
And me and my friends had a lot of fun with
it, like when we were sitting together, but we wanted to
be able to play together when we were not physically together.
So I looked into how to make a server for us.
So we just started playing on a server normally,
and then we thought it was really fun to
build stuff and host games and so on.
So we started opening it up to the public.
And a year, one and a half years later, we
were running one of the biggest server networks here in
Denmark with 3400 concurrent players doing peak hours.
And that included me.
I was the Primary tech,
I was the only tech person more or less
Primary to only.
Primary only tech person.
So I had to learn a lot about networking.
And then I saw a lot of international videos
of people playing Minecraft as well, where they played
on these big servers that had custom stuff.
And I was looking at it and I was
like, how can I make stuff like that?
So I looked into it and I saw there is, there's
like this entire server modding, like you could write plugins in
Java to the server where you could add custom logic.
And then from that I just started learning programming.
And now again, just like the original, falling in love
with the computer, I fell in love with programming.
Oh, that's cool.
And then how did it step into like Python?
Well, great question, fast forward
another three or four years.
Me and my friends were getting older, we
kind of started losing interest in Minecraft.
And I also coded a lot of Minecraft
related stuff, again mostly for the server side.
But I wanted to get into more
general programming because I really loved learning
about tech, I really love programming.
I figured I wanted to make desktop applications because I
was on a computer, I could use a computer.
So I wanted to make stuff that
I could use on the computer.
And I started trying to do that
in Java and it, it worked.
I'm very impressed that I got it to work, but it
worked, but it was very clunky and I wanted something better.
So I researched it and Python immediately came up and
I looked into UI libraries and I looked into auto
updating of like desktop applications and stuff like that.
And then I tried writing my first program
in Python that just did something simple.
I always started with a calculator and then
I converted it into a UI calculator.
It's all in Python with auto updating.
I was super proud of myself.
And then it just took off from there
and it spiraled completely out of control into
this thing I've gotten myself into now.
Yeah, so you have the Pypandoc, right?
Or you're like taking someone's
project and maintaining it.
Yeah, I took it over. So,
Yeah, I took it over.
Could you tell us more about Pypandoc?
Because I also don't know much about it and
where you're maintaining this library, so you must know.
Yeah, sure.
So there is a CLI tool called Pandoc that is
a universal document converter that uses the markdown markup format
to convert between any other, more or less any other
format you can think about anything from HTML to word
to PDF to PowerPoint to Wiki to open document formatted
All the different formats you might want to use,
and then you have markdown as the intermediary format where
you actually write your document contents.
Of course, Python, we love having
Python libraries to do everything.
We don't want to call external stuff if
we have a Python library for it.
So way back when, when, I wanted to make a
text editor for the blind, because I myself is totally
blind, so I wanted to make a text editor where
I could control the visual formatting much, like much better
than I could at the time, in, people at the
time couldn't word or other like mainstream text based.
Yeah, um, take big editors.
And it was also before like stuff like VS Code
and stuff like that really came out.
So I found Pypandoc, which was
this Python wrapper around Pandoc that made
it easy to work with from Python.
And I utilize, I utilized that
to basically power my text editor.
And then I saw that he wasn't updating it
anymore and I started making more and more like,
issues and pull requests that got accepted.
But like, he had kind of like
not worked on it for a while.
So I just at one point emailed him and
asked, hey, if you're not planning on updating it
anymore, is it okay if I take it over?
Because I can see it's still very widely used and
I love it and I would love to maintain it.
And he was like, yeah, sure, I'm
just gonna talk to the other maintainer.
He was also okay with it.
And then they transferred the GitHub repository and
the Package Index publish rights to my account
and the rest as you see is history.
Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah.
I mean, being, even, to like, normal, any one of
us being a maintainer is already really tough, but like,
you not being able to like, see and still being
able to maintain the whole project, that is like so
inspiring for so many people around there, you know?
Yep.
I'm just curious, despite all these challenges, how do
you continue to learn and like to, to improve?
Are there any like, difficulties or
things like that along the way?
When, when there's text based
tutorials, always the best.
Because I read approximately twice as fast as
the, as an average human reader, I read
around six to 700 words a minute.
So I can take in information
Four times faster than me.
Yeah, YouTube can only allow three times speed.
It's not fast enough.
Fair enough.
So when there's text based tutorials for stuff,
I can take in information really fast.
Generally speaking, I haven't had a problem learning because
there's a lot of books on the topic.
There's a lot of articles on
the topic that I've been consuming.
Mostly articles.
Not really a big book person, but many,
many articles, many tutorials and just experimenting.
Recently, though, what I've gotten into is a little
more graphical in nature, so that's a little more
difficult, but I'm getting the hang of it.
Wow.
Yeah.
I also heard from Cheuk
that you've contributed to Poetry.
So could you just tell me a little bit
more about your contribution and what is Poetry?
So Poetry is a dependency manager and
a build tool all in one.
It basically wraps around and makes
virtual environments for all your projects.
You have this Poetry file where you can add
an update dependency with a CLI command, and then
you can build and publish your packages to the
Package Index or a custom index.
All from Poetry.
So it's a CLI tool, like many, like others, but it's
There's a bunch of them these days.
But Poetry, at least what I found was really
the first big one to, like, break through, really
was what other people were using, other than the
combination of pip, virtualenv and setuptools.
I'm kind of, like, very interested in your
experience because, like, I am pretty sure that
your experience is very different from mine.
Like, from, like we said that we play video games when we
were a kid to, like, maybe now we go to conferences.
When you talk about you play Minecraft,
I'm quite interested about, like, how the
experience, because from my experience, Minecraft, you
know, you have to control your character.
You have to, like, build this
block and things like that.
But for someone who uses screen
reader, like, what's your experience?
You found it, like, very easy or very
hard to control or, like, things like that.
Yeah.
So the little extra nuance was that I lost
the rest of my sight when I was 18.
So in 2018.
So back in the day when I, when I
was playing Minecraft, I could see a little bit,
like, we're still talking like two or 3%.
So it's like nothing groundbreaking, nothing new,
getting a driver's license or anything.
But I could see enough.
And that was important because Minecraft by nature
had very high color contrast, like, unintentionally.
So it was much easier to see and
play around with compared to many other games.
Yeah, right.
I know some games now, they have this, like,
high contrast options for folks who need high contrast
as well, but unfortunately, not all of them has.
It's just like other technology, like, you
know, websites, some of them are screen
reader friendly, some of them are not. Really.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah.
But how about conferences like is it?
You know, I guess it must be, like, very challenging for
you to, you know, be far away from home and, you
know, go to a event that is full of people, but
maybe not everybody knows your need and stuff like that.
So I'm lucky that a lot of things working for me.
I love traveling.
First of all, I love, especially traveling
by plane is I love that.
The second is I'm a huge extrovert.
I'm pretty sure Cheuk can
Oh, we can hear that and see that.
I'm pretty sure.
I'm pretty sure Cheuk can sign off on that.
You saw me be around people in Bilbao
So we were having fun at
the cocktail party, like, you know, the drinks
party that we have so many Spanish food.
And yes, it was an interesting experience.
Okay, sounds like there's some brackets behind.
So I'm also curious.
When you're talking about attending a conference,
like, before you attend a conference, do
you actually, like, read to see if
they have specific, like, accessibility?
This has been the entire freaking day.
I'm not very good with
so accessibility, it's okay.
Like, do you actually read like, and
check before you attend any conference?
Like, okay, are they friendly to people with
disabilities or is there any actually, do you
read, like, before you attend a conference?
You know, I always try to find something, or
Yeah, I always try to find something, but it's very
rarely, if at all, they ever have it publicly available.
They,
I've never seen a conference where they have
this accessibility info readily available for what they
do with people that has physical disabilities.
Yeah, I resorted to just writing them an email.
So far that's been very successful.
Also to let them know that you're coming
and that you're like, in my case, that
I'm fully blind and, yeah, that I'm attending.
And I was like, in my case,
that I'm a speaker or whatever, whatever.
Just like, hey, can we do something?
Can we figure something out?
And yeah, they've always been very good at
the whole accessibility, but I just wish that
that information was more readily available.
So people that maybe not was as just like,
out there going as I am also know that,
hey, there's actually things that they're going to do.
Yeah, that's true.
Like, I know that you're very outgoing and you, like,
don't mind emailing and taking one step forward to ask,
but I think if someone who may also have other
needs or they feel a little bit, you know, you
know, there's extra step, like, we should make it easier
for people who need extra help.
Yeah.
So organizers for conferences out there, if you're hearing
this podcast, please make a little effort to just
write down what you can provide for the potential
attendees so that they will feel comfortable.
Yeah, I'm actually working on something like that and
are reaching out and looking for conference organizers.
I'm actually working on something like that.
So there's like, hopefully a place where people
can see other people's experiences and also just
see what conference organizers have said that they
are like, that they are capable and. Yeah.
Capable to do for people with physical disabilities.
Yeah, that's so true.
I think it's a very good message to get out.
It's like, you know, we, we organize a lot of things.
We also know a lot of people organize a lot
of things, and that's a very, very good point.
And I hope, yeah, all of us is doing better than that.
Yeah.
So what do you think about AI?
Because I know that, like, you know, maybe for you, like,
a lot of technology helped you a lot in daily life.
So what do you think about AI technologies?
Do you think it will help you more or do you think
you would take your job as a developer or things like that?
Yes.
So another to kind of answer that question a little,
like, I would love to take a tiny detour and
just say, there is one thing I totally didn't mention
in my intro, and it wasn't for any.
The various reasons, I just totally
also forgot to mention it.
So by, like, on my day to day, I am
a student, I'm a Computer Science student, and I'm, by,
by that, I'm surrounded by other Computer Science students that
are, many of them are just learning.
And it can get really tiresome when instead of
actually trying to look into and try to solve
the problem, which was what I fell in love
with, with programming and tech, they just write a
question to ChatGPT, or just add, pastes code
into ChatGPT and say, "Hey, why isn't this working?"
Yeah, that's, and that, like, it's so sad to
see that people, that this technology is really great.
It's changing a lot of lives, but for
most people, it's just, of course it's where
it's going, but they just, they don't.
I feel like they just.
Most of what I see around me on
my day to day is just, people don't
really have that problem solving mentality so much
anymore, especially if you're just starting out.
That's the whole point of
studying Computer Science, is this.
You need to learn and train this problem solving skill.
And if every problem just be, oh, just ask ChatGPT,
If every solution just becomes, oh, just ask ChatGPT,
then it just kind of falls apart.
And I can see that very quickly because the
second that ChatGPT can't give you an answer
that works, it falls all on the ground.
I really just wanted to get out of that.
But that said, for me, it's really changed.
That's a very good point.
Yeah, that's a very good point.
A little funny story.
This will reveal how much older
I am as compared to you.
Is that my daughter, she's in the University.
And the moment, so the moment when ChatGPT just
came out, they are receiving, you know, schools, you have
reports and you need to write reports, and it seems
that everyone just suddenly improved in writing.
Yeah.
And so you can, you can kind of realize that the
teachers and all this were like, okay, this is weird that
before that you couldn't do it, and now suddenly all my
students are doing really well, and you can hear kids talking
about it and say, like, you know what?
Yeah, just ask ChatGPT to fill up.
They can do perfect reports for us.
Mm hmm. Yeah.
And it's, it's really sad because this, this technology
has fully changed many lives, my own included.
Um, I love, especially for more advanced
topics I don't know that much about.
I love to be like in tech, all of it.
Mostly, I love talking, talking with ChatGPT because it has,
even though it might sometimes come up with dumb information that's
not accurate, it has a lot of training data, so it
has a lot of stuff it can pull from.
Also, the feature I probably use the most is
either image generation or even more so image description.
So I can take a picture with my phone
and I can get the AI to describe the
image, and then I can ask it follow up
questions to that description or to the image specifically.
And I use that daily.
Wow, I love that idea. Yeah.
Speaking about that, I'm just going to bring
back about the tools that you use.
I'm sure there are people out there who are computer
science students with similar disabilities like you, so maybe you
can suggest to them, like, what kind of tools which
you're using that is like, really useful.
Well, yeah, of course.
So, first of all, I can't believe I didn't
mention this sooner, but first of all, there's, of
course, my screen reader that I use every day
to actually interact with my computer called NVDA.
It stands for Non Visual Desktop Access, and they
are also open source and they, NVDA, the screen
reader is actually also written in Python.
Oh yeah. Wow.
Yes.
I use that every day.
And it's been like that piece of software alone has
changed my life and has made me like all be
able to do all this stuff that I do every
day, from coding to playing games to delivering presentations up
on a stage in front of one or two people.
Okay, there's probably more, but I
can't see how many there is.
I don't think it's only one or two.
I can't see how many people are
there, so I do not be nervous.
I just tell myself there's probably only five people and
they'll come and then at the end they all clap
and I'm like, whoa, that was more, oh yeah, that
happened, that happened to me at Bilbao.
That's a funny story.
You can get that later.
Well, yeah, then I use Visual Studio
code to write all my code.
I use the Terminal for a lot of stuff.
I use WSL for all Linux stuff because it's
still on Windows, so I get all the accessibility,
but I get the Linux server basically.
I don't know if there's any like blind specific tools.
And it's just probably the more of what most people do.
I use GitHub, I use Internet browser. Yeah.
What is your favorite browser?
Which browser is the best?
Hot topic.
Very hot.
I actually, I have, I have, yeah,
because it is a hot topic.
It's almost as bad as pineapple on
pizza, like the pineapple and pizza debate.
So I use the Chromium-based Edge browser as my
primary browser because you get all the, all the good
stuff of on Chrome that Chrome has to offer.
You get all that goodness.
And all the websites think you're running Chrome,
so they don't say, hey, you should download
Chrome for the most optimal experience.
So you get all the features and you get all
the goodies, and you can even run Chrome extensions on
the Chromium Edge browser, but you don't get the massive,
massive memory and CPU overhead that Google Chrome has.
So that's what I do and I love it.
Cool.
Yeah, open source for the win.
Yay.
Yeah, open source all the way.
I don't think we have a browser
these days that are not open source.
Now that I think about it, all
three major browsers are open source.
That's true.
So other than coding and programming, tell us a little
bit more about how you stay sane in life.
Like do you stay sane by drinking
a cup of coffee or tea?
Or do you like to go for regular walks or DJ.
I'm very boring.
I go to school, work with
coding, come home, work with coding.
I go to bed, I don't sleep
and dream about code anymore, luckily.
But then I do the same, the same thing.
And, yeah, when I try to stay sane, when I
started, when I try to stay sane, I basically go
on and talk to my online friends while I code.
So, yeah, other than that, yeah, I travel.
I like traveling when I can, but most of it
is to conferences and that's fine because it doesn't feel
like I'm working and it doesn't feel like I'm coding.
Even when I'm,
even when I'm speaking.
It's just so much fun.
And I get totally rejuvenated at being
around people and a community physically. I.
I had no idea how,
how, like, great it was going to be
for me until I was there physically and
tried being in an actual conference.
It was great and it gave me so much energy.
So that's probably the primary bigger things I do.
So on this, like, day to
day, I usually just stop coding.
I watch YouTube here and there and.
But even that bores me relatively quickly.
And I play a video game for an hour or two and then
I get bored and think about how I can mod it and stuff.
Maybe you should write your own game.
Yeah, you should write your own games.
Working on it.
Already working on it.
Don't worry, that's already in the works.
I wish I was joking about that, but I'm not.
Oh, wow. Yeah.
But the bad
is launching.
No.
Give me like two years.
The bad thing about game, the game industry is
the, like, big tools like Unity and Unreal Engine.
Like, two big ones are not accessible.
So I have to write my own game engine. Yeah.
Oh, wow.
So I have to
like wrap C++, or Rust, or something like that. Or Python.
Probably not Python because it doesn't
have all the cool libraries yet. So.
Yeah.
Not forgetting anything.
Can you create them?
I could, but then I need to maintain even more wrappers.
Then it become a long quest. Side quests.
Yes. Listen, I.
Even while doing it in C++, I still have
to create my own game engine from scratch.
So, yeah, that's what I have to deal
with if I want to make a game.
Yeah.
So people out there. People out there.
Just.
Just people out there.
If you want to join forces with Jessica
to create game engine, just contact her.
Yeah. The thing of the.
See, the thing about it is even the open source
ones, they are not really that great with accessibility.
Even the games that they can
create are typically not great
with accessibility either.
So to make an actual accessible game engine,
they can also produce accessible games that needs
to be like, pretty much done from scratch.
And that's why I primarily make it.
I'm primarily making a game engine that
focuses on audio only based games.
So there is no visuals, it's just pure audio.
What genre of game do you like?
Is it like horror or is it like adventure?
So the two genres that I'm aiming for the game engine to
support is most of it is 3D, open world of some kind.
So it's either going to be RPG style, style games,
or it's going to be first-person shooter type games.
Wow, sounds really interesting.
There are so many games out there that depend
so much on, like, looking at stuff, but we,
we are so much more than that.
You know, we can actually use our voice.
We can actually even, even smell.
Why didn't anyone create games related to smell?
That would be so cool.
Yeah, so luckily, luckily these the last couple of
years, a lot of game studios, like bigger Game
studios, have started to implement good accessibility features.
That's why I've been able to
actually play video games again.
So, yeah, I've finally been able to just relax
with a video game, but I've been in the.
I basically been in the whole modding or running, like,
doing something techy with a video game that now it's
just so ingrained in me that I can't just not
do that and just play a game and have fun.
I always, okay, what can I do? Can I mod this?
Can I run a server for this?
Can I write something custom for that server?
Can you just like, shut off for like ten minutes while I
just relax and be stupid in this game where I smash around
in a car and race against other cars and stuff, but now
I have to be able to mod it, apparently.
Yeah.
Jessica, the problem solver.
Yeah, I'm creating a problem and
then I'm trying to solve it.
It's like the chef can't enjoy a good
dinner because they will be criticizing the dish.
Yeah, I had the same when I was
taking a music study class in high school.
And then like a month in, I started, like,
just unintentionally analyzing the music I was listening to,
and I was just like, nope, nope, nope.
Stop it, stop it.
So do you still play music?
Yeah, I actually have a Midi piano keyboard right over
to my right that's hooked up to my computer.
So if I ever want to play something, I do, actually.
So one last question is, what's your next big thing?
Ideally in Python.
So what's your next exciting
contribution to the community?
I am hoping.
I'm really hoping that I get to go
to my first PyCon conference, Python specific conference.
This summer, I applied to be a speaker.
I send out a few CFPs, hope they get
accepted, because if they are, I will so be
going to my first Python specific conference.
So that's the first main thing.
Yeah.
Also, for conferences who are looking for Keynote
Speaker, you know there is a candidate.
You know there is a candidate here.
Also, I have massive stage fright,
so, like, being a Keynote Speaker.
Being a regular speaker is hard enough.
Being a Keynote Speaker.
Oh, don't worry.
There's only two person on it.
There's only two people on the stage.
Um, and
Maybe I can upgrade it to, like.
Maybe I can upgrade it to, like, eight people.
Less than ten.
Yeah.
But here's the issue.
Usually at Keynotes, they, like.
They actually present you and, like, they say
your name and then they clap first.
So I could get a way too good
idea of how many people are actually there.
No.
Like, yeah, if.
If people want, I would love to come up
out and talk about a lot of things.
I have a lot of things to talk about, and I talk a lot.
So if they want to reach out
to you, how do they get to.
Reach out to you?
Like social media.
Yeah.
So there is my website, jessicategner.com, and you
can always write me an email, jessica@jessicategner.com.
or they can reach out to me on LinkedIn.
All of the stuff is very easy
and easy to find on my website. And.
Yeah, LinkedIn, GitHub, email.
Yes, that's.
That's the primary ones.
Perfect.
Sounds great.
So thank you so much, Jessica, for coming over here
and telling us about your journey from zero to hero.
Thank you.
And you can find us on pypodcats.live.
There's P Y P O D C A T, like meow@pypodcats
not podcast, dot live
L I V E.
Or on PSF YouTube channel,
Apple Podcasts, Spotify, et cetera.
So catch up with you during the next episodes.
So my name is Georgi.
And I'm Cheuk
And our guest, Jessica.
Yay.
See ya.
Yeah, bye.
See you. Bye.