SEEKING WORK - REMOTE - from India.
I'm the creator of xtopdf, a PDF creation toolkit for Python. xtopdf is used by Packt Publishing, the Software Freedom Law Center, ESRI.nl and others.
xtopdf can create both business reports and ebooks, and currently has support for the following input formats (more are always in the pipeline): text, DBF, CSV, TSV/TDV, XLS, XLSX, DOCX, ODBC, SQLAlchemy, MongoDB, Berkeley DB, SQLite, standard input, XML.
Also:
<a href="http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/02/create-pdf-calendars-with-xtopdf.html" >  :-)
An online presentation that gives a good overview of xtopdf:
<a href="http://slid.es/vasudevram/xtopdf" > (the words in light blue in the presentation are links to more information; there are many of them)
xtopdf source code on Bitbucket:
<a href="https://bitbucket.org/vasudevram/xtopdf" >
An article about xtopdf for Packt Publishing:
<a href="http://www.packtpub.com/article/Using_xtopdf" >
<a href="http://google.com/search?q=xtopdf" >
Have been an independent developer for the last several years, with many years of experience in many technical areas. Have contracted/consulted to multiple startups based in USA and India. Earlier worked for large well-known
US software product and Indian software services companies.
Skills: Python, C, Linux, UNIX, many open source technologies, many databases, XML-RPC, PDF programming (both PDF generation and PDF text extraction), file and data format conversion, data munging, command-line utility development, Flask, MongoDB, Bottle, various others.
Worked on Ruby, Rails and Java earlier. Was server lead / senior engineer for two commercial Rails-based dot-com products earlier, by US companies. One of them was TaskBin - <a href="http://taskbin.com" > .
Databases worked on: Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, Oracle, Sybase, Informix, SQLite, MS SQL Server. Used databases in most of the projects I've worked on in my career.
Worked on a best-selling retail banking product (earlier, in C with proprietary DB and UI libs). Was team leader for a database middleware product (in C) that was widely used in client projects by a top software services company.
Did a lot of UNIX support and successful troubleshooting for years (some years earlier), still have some of those skills, which are often useful in development too. Had many times recovered clients' data from corrupted file systems or crashed machines (with no backups :), using various tricks of the trade learnt on the job, and solved various
other software problems, often involving various interacting software components (from OS level through language compilers to application programs and databases). Wrote lots of utilities in C and UNIX shell tools (sed, awk, grep and friends) to automate various tasks (for both users and developers), convert data between various formats from one
platform to another, etc.
Relevant links:
My Bitbucket account with my open source projects:
<a href="https://bitbucket.org/vasudevram" >
Biz site: <a href="http://www.dancingbison.com" > (see Home, Products, Services, About pages there)
<a href="http://www.binpress.com/profile/vasudev-ram/3425" >
Posts about Python:
<a href="http://jugad2.blogspot.com/search/label/python" >
Posts about xtopdf:
<a href="http://jugad2.blogspot.com/search/label/xtopdf" >
Blog: <a href="http://jugad2.blogspot.com" >
Article by me about "Developing a Linux command-line utility" (in C) was published on IBM developerWorks and translated by IBM into Chinese and Japanese for those versions of their site. Some organizations have developed production command line tools using that article as a guide.
Contact info: <a href="http://dancingbison.com/contact.html" > (email, Skype). Twitter: @vasudevram
Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (March 2014)