InStep Technologies is a group of senior technical professionals that is widely recognized as a supplier of premier services to the most successful companies in the San Francisco Bay area and throughout the US and Canada.

• Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
• Object-oriented design (OOD)
• GUIDS Methodology
• Visual Basic. NET and C# implementation
• Web application design and development
• Pocket PC and Windows CE implementation

• Speak at conferences world wide including the Software Development Conference and VSLive!
• Write technical articles for MSDN
• Write technical articles for magazines such as Visual Basic Programmer's Journal and CoDe magazine
• Write technical books on current software design and development topics

Deborah Kurata is a professional software architect, designer, and developer. She provides consulting services in the areas of project architecture and design, software development (Windows and smart-client applications), and mentoring services. She is frequently brought in to assist existing teams with establishing best practices and defining an appropriate architecture and application framework.

Deborah has authored several books, including the Doing Objects in Visual Basic series (SAMS), Best Kept Secrets in .NET (Apress) and Doing Web Development: Client-Side Techniques (Apress), and is currently working on Doing Objects in VB 2005 (Addison-Wesley). She also writes for MSDN and CoDe magazine (www.code-magazine.com).

Deborah speaks at .NET user groups all over the country as a member of the INETA Speaker’s Bureau (www.ineta.org) and at conferences, such as VSLive, DevDays, and TechEd. She enjoys participating in the local .NET community as a member of the Bay.NET board and co-chair of the East Bay.NET user group (www.baynetug.org). For her work in support of software development and software developers, she has been recognized with the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award.

From FogCreek blog "What does a 'world class' programmer know?":

"Imo, most book authors are essentially very good coders, however, to make it easy for me and you -- I will list a few book authors who I feel fall into the top-notch business software developer category." ...

"Deborah Kurata -- an early advocate of object-oriented programming with VB. Those VB programmers who were lucky/smart enough to follow her advice are going to find the move to Microsoft .NET a lot easier than VB programmers who only have experience with procedural programming." ...

"So what do these book authors have in common besides owning their own companies?  All of them can take a software project from cradle-to-grave all by themselves (if they had to). Another thing they all have in common is that they have developed their own software development methodologies (i.e. someone who can "roll his own" for any task)."
 

Jerry Kurata is a Principal Solutions Architect responsible for designing and implementing high performance internet solutions, Windows applications, and compact device solutions. He also writes for DevX.

Jerry served as senior consultant to Microsoft and helped define the Web publishing and real-time conferencing components of Microsoft Office.  Jerry has recently lead teams to develop Web sites and Windows applications for large commercial accounts. He also works with eBay customers, assisting them in implementing the eBay APIs and toolkit.

Prior to joining InStep, Jerry was Senior Consultant for Digital Equipment Corporation. In this position, Jerry developed computer systems for a number of clients including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, Applied Materials, and Phillip Morris.