12.5 Million Downloads a Month. She's Never Seen Her Code on a Screen.
A visually impaired developer in Copenhagen maintains pypandoc, a top 1% Python package with 12.5M monthly downloads used by Adobe, Google, and Microsoft
12.5 million monthly downloads. One maintainer.
Jessica Tegner runs pypandoc from Copenhagen. The package ships in two flavors:
- pypandoc, the base wrapper, 4.8 million monthly downloads
- pypandoc_binary, bundled with pandoc, 7.7 million monthly downloads
Combined: 12.5 million installations every month. PyPI classifies it as a top 1% critical package. Adobe uses it. Google uses it. Microsoft uses it. Apache Spark used it. IBM Watson depended on it.
She took over the project in July 2021. She found out the download numbers afterward.
Jessica lost her vision in 2018. She has never seen a line of pypandoc on a screen. Every function, every release, every bug fix she ships goes through a screen reader that converts text to audio at twice the speed most people can follow spoken language. The IDE, the terminal, the GitHub interface, the PyPI dashboard, all of it arrives as sound.
She is not a curiosity or an exception. She is a working software engineer who maintains critical Python infrastructure, speaks at international conferences, has interned on Uber's autoscaler team, and was selected for the first GitHub Accelerator cohort from over 1,000 applications.
Her visual impairment shapes how she writes code, how she designs tools, and why accessibility is a first principle rather than an afterthought. It is not the reason she is good at what she does. It is the context in which she does it.
This is the story of someone who depended on a library for her accessibility tool, sent one email when it went silent, and accidentally became the person behind 12.5 million monthly downloads that even Google depends on.