Everyone is getting older. A senior C++ developer shares the lessons she has learned staying vital in an ever-changing industry.
Jan 26th, 2025 6:00am by David Cassel
Last summer, a remarkable opening keynote was given at Toronto’s CppNorth conference, and the conference has finally uploaded the video to YouTube shortly before New Year’s Day. Maybe it was the organizers’ way of reaching beyond their audience of C++ developers to the broader community planning their New Year’s resolutions — because the video makes you want to exercise, take care of your body and prepare for your best possible old age.
But more importantly, Kate Gregory gave the audience her reasons why to prepare for the future — along with some surprising statistics, the latest research and the results of her survey of “hundreds of people, the world over.”
“I went out and found articles and studies and papers, and a lot of them surprised the heck out of me — so I’m going to share some of that with you,” she said.
Most of all, Gregory shared her perspective, and the hard-won wisdom you get from being a melanoma survivor. As she told her audience, “I went through a lot of stuff, and I’ve gathered up some advice for y’all. It’s pretty good for me, so I want to share it.”
The talk was titled “The Aging Programmer,” and it clearly struck a nerve. “The nearly crying responses surprised me at first,” Gregory told me in a follow-up email interview, “but I think that’s because I’m used to the material. Telling people ‘You are going to go to funerals’ can be a bit of a punch in the gut.”
About Kate Gregory
Gregory was a natural choice to speak at a conference for C++ developers, as she’s one of the three leads on the C++ successor language project Carbon. But her lively talk showed her programming savvy, with knowing asides about familiar sights like caffeinated coders — “Frankly, I think a lot of us are self-medicating our ADHD” — and life as an independent consultant.
“If you don’t need the money, you can freelance. Because that’s sometimes how that works.”
Since 1986, she’s been a partner in Gregory Consulting Limited (which helps businesses with everything from programming and project management to training, mentoring, technical writing and generally supporting developers). Based in Ontario, Canada, Gregory is also a long-time volunteer Microsoft regional director (2002–2019), and has even created online courses about C++ and Visual Studio for Pluralsight. She’s also authored over a dozen books on programming, and “has been paid to program since 1979,” according to her profile on Amazon.
But first, 63-year-old Gregory introduced herself to her audience as “not retired, not retiring,” promising to tell even her much-younger viewers things they can do “that will give you a happier and healthier old age, and let you work longer.” And in our email interview, Gregory said “My response to those who said I brought them to tears was ‘Thank you.’ I wanted to reach people and get them thinking about all of this.
“That includes your own legacy as well as the day-to-day realities of living in the last three or four decades of your life.”
Healthier Habits
Gregory shared advice on everything from the health benefits of painkillers to the importance of bone-strengthening exercises. “Moderate exercise in midlife or late life reduced odds of having mild cognitive impairment,” explained one slide.
There were tips on preventing hearing loss. (“That means staying away from loud noises, and plugging your ears when you can’t stay away from loud noises.”) And there’s many other healthy habits that young programmers can start now.
- Don’t smoke.
- Drink alcohol in moderation if at all. (“If you’re going to drink a little poison every day, don’t drink a lot of poison every day,” Gregory quipped.)
Besides the usual advice to eat fruits and vegetables while avoiding ultra-processed foods, Gregory added another more philosophical point:
- Don’t overwork.
“You know they say, ‘No one ever says on their deathbed, I wish I’d spent more time at the office.’ But it’s good advice. Those people who died? They got replaced, pretty quick…”
Gregory’s slides are available online — each one distilling a pearl of wisdom about aging, such as:
- You don’t have to become a manager.
And Gregory’s brush with melanoma gave real credibility to a bullet point urging, “Wear sunscreen and hats.”
“Be that person who covers up in the sun,” Gregory told the audience matter-of-factly. “Because while I survived melanoma, lots of people don’t.”
Some problems can be solved with old-fashioned common sense. Three-quarters of Gregory’s survey respondents were worried about how aging would affect their eyesight. “Isn’t that a solved problem?” she joked, while recommending regular eye exams and “reader” glasses. “That’s a $20 problem. Now you can read bottles, you can read instructions, you can read all those fiddly little things that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to see.”
Proper eyewear brings other advantages:
- Your mystery headaches disappear.
- You may have less confusion caused by not quite following what you’re trying to read.
And here’s one that’s programming related: “Some of you are bumping your font and bumping your font and bumping your font. And when you get glasses, we can go back to getting pages and pages of code on the screen. And that’s got to be worth it!”
The Saddest Slide
But another slide was headlined “Life comes at you fast”:
- Your plans, I’m sorry to say, can be taken from you.
Here Gregory shook her head. “Stuff just happens.”
“And what happens next can genuinely be mitigated by resources. If you have been saving money, having money will fix a lot of things.”
Resources can mean skills — emotional, practical, communication and technical — and personal resources like “people you can rely on” and your own strength, both physical and emotional.
The next slide was the one that seemingly hit people the hardest: “Two or three people did mention the ‘Loss’ slide,” Gregory told me. Its bullet points captured the unsentimentality of life itself.
- Companies are going to close.
- Friends will move away, change or die.
There they were, all listed out, the big disappointments and the small.
- They will stop making that ice cream you love.
- You won’t be physically able to do certain things you loved doing.
“And, people die,” Gregory said — before giving some very sound advice. “The only cure for loss is gain.”
“Something is lost every day. That will happen, no matter what you do. The something gained — is up to you.”
The Good Parts
The next slide was titled “Make New Friends,” while Gregory added encouragingly that “if you try enough new things, some of them will turn out to be great. And make a big difference in your life.”
And soon she’d moved to a hopeful slide, offering “the good parts” of getting older.
- You probably have more time and money.
- They play your music in the grocery store.
- People’s assumptions about you might be in your favor.
“They think you’re wiser than you are, or more connected than you are,” Gregory told the audience, adding “And you can get away with a lot of stuff.” She told the story of an old man who refused to present his ATM card to live bank tellers — and how tellers at the bank simply worked around it and pulled up his account themselves.
Two more advantages of getting older?
- You are less afraid.
- People have less power over you.
“You have seen the reorgs, and you have seen the ‘transformational projects,’ and you have lost jobs and gotten different ones, and you’ve been through a lot. You know? And a lot of it’s worked out, has not been as catastrophic. Spend less time being afraid!”
Some of the bullet points seemed drawn from her own life.
- Age discrimination is real.
- Consulting is an option.
“Interestingly, as soon as you switch to consulting, your age becomes a plus,” Gregory told the audience. “Instead of being a resource whose time left is dwindling — ‘Why would I train you? You’ve only got five more years until you retire?’ — suddenly you’re the senior person with a ton of experience who’s going to bring all that experience in as a consultant!”
Aging and Optimism
But this led to a fascinating insight. With all this talk about how other people treat older programmers, Gregory warned that “We can be ‘other people’ too.” And it’s not just a do-unto-others adage. “Studies have shown that how you think about aging has a measurable effect on how you age.”
Pessimistic people were more likely to be hospitalized, partly because “If you are optimistic and happy and you believe it’s going to work out, then you have less stress.”
Gregory calls healthy aging a learned skill — which is an important insight in itself. Because “if you believe that, you’ll go learn it! And you will do the exercises, and you will wear the sunscreen, and you will get your eyes checked, and you will get your ears checked … and you will have a happier and healthier old age as a result.”
“So there’s things you can start doing — including, stop being ‘other people’ about old people.”
As Gregory came to a close, she passionately distilled her talk’s key points into a lightning round of simple, actionable advice to choose the path of aging healthily. “I’m sorry, you’ve got to exercise. For your body, for your brain. For your mind, for your moods.”
What else?
“Make friends. Keep making friends. Never stop. Find some purpose that drives you, something you can connect to that makes you happy to be doing what you’re doing.
“Because it’s not too soon; no matter how young you are, it is not too soon to start. But also: It’s not too late.
“It’s never too late to be a happy aging programmer.”
Story from Thenewstack.io
David Cassel | Author
David Cassel is a proud resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, where he’s been covering technology news for more than two decades. Over the years his articles have appeared everywhere from CNN, MSNBC, and the Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition to Salon, Wired News, Suck.com, and even the original HotWired, as well as Gawker, Gizmodo, McSweeneys, and Wonkette. He’s now broadening his career skills by becoming a part-time computer programmer, developing two Android apps, co-producing two word games for Amazon’s Kindle, and dabbling in interactive fiction.
