Kate is a founding partner of Gregory Consulting Limited. She has over five decades of
software development experience in a variety of programming languages
including Fortran, PL/I, C++, Java, Visual Basic, and C#. In 1989 Kate finally started using the Internet,
after hearing about it for years from friends who were already addicted. In early 1995
Kate co-authored a book on Usenet for Que, kicking off a writing career that now
covers over a dozen books on programming
and related topics. She is also
a standup instructor, teaching C++ programming and related topics. A number of her courses are available through
Pluralsight. Kate's
outstanding energy and knowledge of her subject matter have put her teaching in high
demand around the world. Her recent programming work is almost exclusively in C++,
on a variety of projects.
When not writing code, Kate handles project management duties, both
within the firm and for clients, and mentors small teams of
developers.
She is one of the three leads of the Carbon Language project,
an organizer of CppNorth, an annual C++ conference in Toronto, and a co-founder of #include <C++>.
Kate is also available as a speaker. She has been bringing her enthusiasm
and technical expertise to standing room-only crowds since 1997, and has keynoted on five continents. Kate loves to show off new technologies; recent conferences include CppNorth, Meeting C++, ACCU, and NDC Techtown. Her
speaker ratings are consistently in the top 10%. Upcoming speaking engagements are on Kate's blog and previous talks on a playlist.
She was Microsoft Regional Director for Toronto for 2002 to 2019, and from January 2004 to July 2024, when she chose to leave the program, was awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional designation for Visual C++.
On the balance she strikes among the
various kinds of work available to her, Kate says:
I absolutely love teaching and speaking, but could never do it four weeks a month
-- I'd collapse from exhaustion. But more importantly, what would I have to speak about or
to base my teaching on, if I never actually did any of this anymore? Writing books is a
great way to get beta software and learn new techniques; programming contracts, web
development contracts, and mentoring assignments let me put these techniques and software into harness and really
find out what they are about. Then I can take that knowledge to a larger audience and
really provide something of value. If Brian or our employees got
all the programming and web work, I wouldn't be such a good trainer, speaker or writer. We
make a point of sharing that work around.
Kate spent many years as an adjunct faculty
member of the Department of Computer Studies and Computer Science
at Trent University, teaching Object Oriented Design and C++. She
blogs regularly on technical
issues, career development, and community matters, is active on
StackOverflow,
and is on Twitter as @gregcons and BlueSky as @gregcons.bsky.social. Kate holds a Ph.D. in
Chemical Engineering from the University of Toronto (1992.)
Kate can be reached at kate@gregcons.com. Check out our Mentoring
program if
you'd like Kate to work with you one-on-one to get you working with new
technologies.