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Developers of custom software and educational simulations.
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Consulting at Kurtz-Fernhout Software

Note: This information is out of date. We are forming a new non-profit to house our software and we are no longer taking on additional consulting projects. Please see the updated information on our press release page.

We support our software development effort partly by taking on custom programming contracts both on-site and off-site. We can customize our existing products to your needs, and we can work on your projects.

Paul Fernhout received his B.A. in Psychology from Princeton University and his M.A. degree from the Ecology program at SUNY Stony Brook. He has done some Ph.D. graduate work at Princeton in Operations Research and Statistics. He has been programming for nearly twenty years (starting in high school) and has developed six nationally distributed software products. Paul's programming experience is mainly in Smalltalk, Delphi and C++, though he has worked in a wide variety of languages and environments (like Forth, Lisp, Occam, Assembler, Visual Basic, and Python). He also has experience in robotics, electronics, language and compiler development, graphics, and embedded systems. Besides providing informal mentoring for clients while developing applications and architectures, he has also taught object-oriented programming and simulation at the college level to biology majors. Paul has longstanding interests in sustainable technology and space settlement.

Cynthia Kurtz received her B.S. in Biology from Clarion University of Pennsylvania and her M.A. degree from the Ecology program at SUNY Stony Brook. She has also done several years of Ph.D. graduate work in ecology. She has been programming for almost ten years and has developed three nationally distributed software products. Cynthia's programming experience is mainly in Delphi, C++, and Paradox. She has done some work in Visual Basic, Access, and Smalltalk. She has also done a considerable amount of technical writing, most recently with RoboHELP and FrameMaker. She created this web site. She is an amateur artist, working both in traditional media and in Painter, Paint Shop Pro, and Photoshop. You can see examples of her graphics work in the PlantStudio picture gallery. Cynthia has longstanding interests in public science education and the promotion of cultural understanding.

Both of us have experience with project life cycles from conception through version 1.1 and beyond. For resumes, rates, or other information on consulting, contact us at info@kurtz-fernhout.com.

Over the past few years, we have done consulting mostly related to VisualWorks Smalltalk, Delphi, and technical writing. With the rise of Linux, Python, Apache, Perl, Squeak, GCC, and so on, we feel a major shift is likely to take place in the software industry over the next five years. The internet has made collaborative development and support of open-source projects much easier. We feel there will still be a need for skilled professionals to customize general solutions for specific proprietary end user needs. But, we feel the base solutions will in the future be primarily open ones. The major reasons for this shift relate mostly to reliability, maintainability, and availability -- lower cost is just a minor issue. We're interested in transitioning our consulting work over the next couple of years to projects mainly related to open source software, like Squeak Smalltalk.

We are comfortable providing fixed cost bids for well defined projects. We also do some work on an hourly basis. So if you have a project that can be outsourced, we're always happy to talk.

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Updated: May 24, 2002. Questions/comments on site to webmaster@kurtz-fernhout.com.
Copyright © 1998, 1999 Paul D. Fernhout & Cynthia F. Kurtz.