Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (February 2015)

SEEKING WORK - Remote

Location: Sydney, Australia

What I do: Conversion Rate Optimisation / PPC & SEO (Think of a slightly less technical version of patio11)

URL: http://www.afterwire.com.au/

Pitch: I've spent a number of years working at some major agencies where I was the lead consultant for some huge multinational brands when it came to a lot of their digital marketing.

I've since decided to move away from the world of salaries and make a go of things on my own with my partner who was the head of Conversion Rate Optimisation and Analytics for all of Asia Pacific for another huge multinational agency.

We are looking to work with a couple of businesses upfront in either a purely commission based fashion or alternatively for HEAVILY DISCOUNTED rates. Right now we are focused on developing a couple of killer case studies that we can use in the future.

If you work with a business where moving the needle a few percentage points is likely to have a real impact in terms of financials for the business I would love to speak with you. You can get in touch with me at mark [at] afterwire.com.au

SEEKING WORK - Remote / Travel possible

Location: UK

Hugely experienced veteran of top consultancies like ThoughtWorks and many web start-ups in hands-on technical positions up to CTO level over the last 20 years. I help my clients plan and build ruthlessly effective software using the latest tools and high-quality thinking, and I help teams get better results.

I care more about creating value than about specific technologies, but I have particular technical expertise in Rails (core contributor), Linux, PostgreSQL, Clojure, React and all the usual front-end suspects. I’m regularly among the 100 most active worldwide contributors on Github.

steve@sanityinc.com / https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevepurcell / https://github.com/purcell

SEEKING WORK: London, UK or remote

I'm a full-stack developer with nearly a decade of professional experience. I like Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, and Python. Right now I'm looking for a 3-6 month full-time contract, ideally in London. For remote roles I'm available longer-term too.

I spent 4 and a half years at Last.fm, giving me experience in writing code that scales to millions of users. I helped a medical startup rearchitect their code to be testable, more reliable, and extendable. More recently I wrapped up a Rails project for Skype with a tight deadline and non-negotiable scope. Together with one other developer, we delivered it on time and under budget.

My ideal contract would be one of these:

- You're a startup looking for help building your product, developing a roadmap, iterating with customers, and building your permanent team.

- You're in a tight spot and in need of rescue. Maybe you've got too much technical debt. Maybe you've got no tests and no documentation. Maybe you've got no supporting infrastructure and no backups. I'll help you get back to a good place.

- You've got a team you trust, but don't have enough developers right now. You need someone who'll get up to speed quickly, turn up on time, and pull his weight with the rest of the team.

You can find out more about me from my CV and portfolio: http://alexpounds.com/cv http://alexpounds.com/portfolio

And if you'd like to work with me, I'd love to hear from you: http://alexpounds.com/contact

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