SEEKING WORK - India - REMOTE.

Been an independent developer / consultant for the last several years, with many years of experience in various technical areas and done projects in various business domains. 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.

I'm the creator of xtopdf, a versatile 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: text, DBF, CSV, TSV/TDV, XLS, XLSX, DOCX, ODBC, SQLAlchemy, MongoDB, Berkeley DB, SQLite, standard input, XML. I add more features to it now and then, whether it be support for more input formats, or demo applications that show how to use it with various web frameworks or together with other libraries, to accomplish various tasks related to PDF generation.

An online presentation that gives a good overview of xtopdf:

http://slid.es/vasudevram/xtopdf

xtopdf source code on Bitbucket:

https://bitbucket.org/vasudevram/xtopdf

An article about xtopdf for Packt Publishing:

http://www.packtpub.com/article/Using_xtopdf
(link may be broken, can send the original article)

http://google.com/search?q=xtopdf

Skills/experience: Python, C, Linux, UNIX shell scripting, many open source technologies, many popular relational 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 (with Python and Flask), software testing (unit and integration), 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-based startups. One of them was TaskBin -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, as a developer, and some
experience with database design / normalization.

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:

https://bitbucket.org/vasudevram

Biz site: http://www.dancingbison.com (see Home, Products, Services,
About pages there)

Posts about Python:

http://jugad2.blogspot.com/search/label/python

Posts about xtopdf:

http://jugad2.blogspot.com/search/label/xtopdf

Blog: 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 site after being there for some time, but the PDF and code are available from here:

http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/09/my-ibm-developerworks-arti...

Contact info: http://dancingbison.com/contact.html (email, Skype).
Twitter: @vasudevram