SEEKING WORK - from India - REMOTE OK (and wanted).

I'm the creator of xtopdf, a PDF creation toolkit for Python. xtopdf
is used by Packt Publishing (UK), the Software Freedom Law Center (US),
ESRI (NL), among others.

xtopdf can create both a) composite business reports (from a combination of
input sources) and b) simple PDF ebooks; it currently has support for the
following input formats (more are always in the pipeline):

plain text, HTML text, DBF/XBASE, CSV, TSV/TDV, XLS, XLSX, DOC, DOCX,
SQLAlchemy, PyDAL, MongoDB, Berkeley DB, SQLite, standard input (think
UNIX data-munging pipelines involving sed, grep, awk and friends, with
PDF as the final output [1]), XML, tablib, PrettyTable, JSON, MySQL, MS Access,
and any database that supports the Python DB API or ODBC.

[1] http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2013/12/xtopdf-pdfwriter-can-creat...

There are proof of concept apps for using xtopdf with command-line (CLI),
GUI (wxPython), Web (Flask, Bottle, CherryPy, Netius, WSGI) user interfaces,
and via XML-RPC. It can be made to work with other GUI toolkits and Web
frameworks too. xtopdf runs on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X (and can probably
run on other UNIXen too, though not tested on them, due to being written in
a mainly platform-independent way).

Also:

http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/02/create-pdf-calendars-with-... :-)

An online presentation that gives a good overview of xtopdf:

http://slid.es/vasudevram/xtopdf
(the words in light blue in the presentation are links
to more information; there are many such links)

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 final draft on request)

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, 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, SQLAlchemy,
RESTful API design, implementation and use, git, mercurial (hg), SVN,
various others. Worked a good amount on Ruby, Java and C earlier -
somewhat rusty on them but can pick up / refresh again.

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 - 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. ORMs or similar:
ActiveRecord with Ruby on Rails, SQLAlchemy with Python.

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 many 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. A nice example: writing a pair of programs -
a Java servlet/HTML form and a UNIX C setuid program - that worked together
to provide safe, controlled access with escalated privileges (of the DBA user)
to developers via the browser.

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)

http://www.binpress.com/profile/vasudev-ram/3425

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

An 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.

The article (in PDF) and its source code can be accessed via this page:

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

and a practical use of the utility, together with my xtopdf library,
can be seen here:

http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/10/print-selected-text-pages-...

==> Would love to work on a project that involved C (apart from my main current skills such as Python, Linux and databases mentioned above).

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