2,494 karma · joined April 18, 2013
I'm Vasudev Ram, an independent software consultant, trainer, and writer, with many years of software experience in multiple technologies and business domains. Software and database design, Python, Flask, SQL and many relational databases, Unix and Linux, PDF generation and the use of many open source tools and libraries, are among my main (current) technology skills, though I've worked on many other areas earlier, such as Ruby, Rails, Java, servlets, C (a lot, on Unix, some on Windows), Visual Basic, and proprietary and higher-end Unix versions (HP-UX and others).
I also have team leadership and project management experience in companies where I worked.
I have a lot of experience on 1) software development projects (spanning different parts of the life cycle, such as requirements, design, development, and testing), and 2) some experience on software product development, in companies (and also increasingly, by my own independent product work).
I was the team leader for a successful database middleware product developed in C on Windows, which was somewhat widely used in client projects.
Programmatic PDF generation is one of my niche interests, and I created xtopdf, a PDF creation toolkit for Python; see this presentation about xtopdf for an overview:
http://slides.com/vasudevram/xtopdf
xtopdf is used by some well-known organizations (and others), including Packt Publishing (UK), the Software Freedom Law Center (USA), and ESRI (NL). I've received email from people from these organizations, telling me that they use and like xtopdf.
Follow me on Gumroad for my software product updates - I will release some products over time (software, books and courses):
https://gumroad.com/vasudevram/follow
If you follow, you will only get email from me when I release a new product or a new version of an existing product.
Web site: https://vasudevram.github.io
Blog: http://jugad2.blogspot.com - about Python, Linux, open source, startups, innovation, ... (see About page there) - running it from 2008, so a lot of posts there.
I've written a few technical articles, which have been somewhat well received, on topics such as C (about developing Linux utilities), Python (about using xtopdf), Linux (about using Knoppix) and vi (a vi quickstart tutorial), on sites like IBM developerWorks, Packt Publishing, and Linux For You. Links to the the articles are available from the About page of my blog (see above) or from my web site (see above).
Posts about Python: jugad2.blogspot.com/search/label/python
Posts about xtopdf: jugad2.blogspot.com/search/label/xtopdf
Posts about DLang: jugad2.blogspot.com/search/label/DLang
Use the same sort of URL as the above 3, to get categories of posts with other labels - just change the label at the end of the URL, i.e the word after the last slash. Or look at the right margin of my blog to find labels for topics of interest (warning - it is rather long).
My Python recipes on ActiveState Code:
code.activestate.com/recipes/users/4173351/
My Bitbucket account (with my open source projects): https://bitbucket.org/vasudevram (all or most there are my own projects, including xtopdf, PDFXMLRPC and PySiteCreator)
My Github account: https://github.com/vasudevram (mainly other people's projects, that I've forked, there, as of now (for me to study); some of my own will be added over time).