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.
An online presentation that gives a good overview of xtopdf:
<a href="http://slid.es/vasudevram/xtopdf" >
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" >
(link may be broken, can send the original article)
<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, SQLAlchemy, REST API 
design and development (in Python and Flask), 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.
(Article archived from the IBM dW site after being there for some time, 
can send the original.)
Contact info: <a href="http://dancingbison.com/contact.html" > (email, Skype).
Twitter: @vasudevram
Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (October 2014)