Kate is a founding partner of Gregory Consulting Limited. She has
over three 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. Her most recent title is
C++ AMP:
Accelerated Massive Parallelism with Microsoft Visual C++ for
Microsoft Press. She is also
a standup instructor, teaching C++ programming, Microsoft .NET, XML,
Object Oriented concepts, UML, Windows development, 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 Visual C++
(managed and native) and .NET languages (C# and VB),
on a variety of projects. Application integration (especially connecting
existing legacy code to new .NET components such as a WPF UI, a WCF
provider or consumer, or a web-based UI) is a particular speciality.
When not writing code, Kate handles project management duties, both
within the firm and for clients, and mentors small teams of
developers.
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 is also available as a speaker. She has been bringing her enthusiasm
and technical expertise to standing room-only crowds since 1997, and many
times has toured Canada to deliver DevDays or other all-day
developer-focused information for Microsoft Canada. Kate loves to show off
new technologies; recent conferences include
TechEd USA, TechEd Europe, Tech Ed Africa, VSLive Toronto, C++ Connections
(with fellow speakers Herb Sutter and Bjarne Stroustrup) and
CppCon, which
she helps to organize. Her
speaker ratings are consistently in the top 10%. Upcoming speaking engagements are on Kate's blog. In 2003 she was accepted to the INETA
speaker's bureau and travelled North America to speak to user groups. Since
January 2002 she has been Microsoft Regional
Director for Toronto and in January 2004 she was awarded the Microsoft
Most Valuable Professional designation for Visual C++. She was named an Outstanding Regional Director in 2004 for her press work and Regional Director of the Year in 2005.
Kate is a founding member
of the Toronto .NET User Group
the East of Toronto
.NET Users Group, and the Kawartha Software Developers Association. She 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. 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.