SEEKING WORK - remote - India.
Creator of xtopdf, a PDF creation toolkit for Python (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, XML, ODBC, SQLAlchemy, MongoDB, XML.
xtopdf links:
<a href="http://slid.es/vasudevram/xtopdf" >
<a href="https://bitbucket.org/vasudevram/xtopdf" >
<a href="http://www.packtpub.com/article/Using_xtopdf" >
<a href="http://google.com/search?q=xtopdf" >
Independent developer for the last several years, with many years of experience in many tech areas. Contracted/consulted to multiple startups based in USA, Europe and India. Earlier worked for large well-known US software product and Indian software services companies.
Elected as a member of the Python Software Foundation (PSF) in 2010.
Skills: Good - Python, C, Linux, UNIX, many open source technologies, many popular/mainstream databases, XML-RPC, PDF programming, file and data format conversion, data munging, command-line utility development. Fair: Flask, MongoDB, Bottle, various others.
Have worked some on Ruby, Rails and Java earlier. 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" > - for the first version.
Worked on a best-selling retail banking product (in C with proprietary DB and UI libs). Team leader for a database middleware product (in C) widely used in client projects by a top software services company.
Databases worked on: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase, Informix, SQLite. Used relational databases in the majority of projects I've worked on.
Did a lot of UNIX support and successful troubleshooting for years (some years earlier), still have some of those skills, which are 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:
Biz site: <a href="http://www.dancingbison.com" > (see Home, Products, Services, About pages there)
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" >
LinkedIn profile: <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/vasudevram" >
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? (January 2014)