Heather Downing is a developer advocate at Yugabyte and founder of VennApps. She teaches developers through live examples spanning agent memory, application infrastructure, APIs and software careers.[1][2]
Start with Shared Memory for AI Coding Agents: A Live Build with Meko →
X Career
Downing works at Yugabyte after serving as a principal developer advocate at Okta. Her employer biography describes earlier enterprise mobile, SQL and voice-application work. Her own speaker profile identifies her as founder of VennApps and lists talks on technical confidence, leadership and the habits that make developers’ work visible to others.[1][2]
Contributions
Demonstrate memory across separate agent sessions
Downing demonstrates resuming work, inspecting earlier context and promoting information into shared knowledge. Ranganathan credits her with the demonstration outline, its shared context and the early-access launch. She supplies the developer workflow alongside his infrastructure explanation.[3]
Make persistence decisions explicit
Her Meko webinar uses two agents: one records decisions and reasons, and another retrieves them in a fresh process. It distinguishes private memory from shared knowledge, makes application code control persistence and traces memory reads and writes.[2]
Ideas
In a webinar with Arcade’s Guru Sattanathan, Downing explores connecting agent tools and a database-backed application. The session covers authorization, governance and the path from a demonstration to a running system. Her teaching places tool access and operational controls alongside the model’s ability to choose an action.[4]
Tools, writing & talks
Writing, research & talks
Start here
Shared Memory for AI Coding Agents: A Live Build with Mekoinfo.yugabyte.comA practical webinar about scoped memory, shared knowledge and inspectable persistence.
Begin with the two-agent scenario, then follow which information is private and which is shared. The webinar is designed to be followed without prior experience; trying it requires a Meko account.
Instructor[2]Yugabyte's co-CEO argues shared, governed, promotable context is the missing layer for agent teams, and reports tuning a RAG pipeline one variable at a time to lift faithfulness from 14% to 82% with far less context, plus a demo of cross-agent resume.
Catalog workOriginal sourceA joint presentation in which Downing demonstrates the Meko workflow.
Co-presenter and demonstrator[3]- Production-ready AI agents with Arcadeinfo.yugabyte.com
A joint session about connecting tools, authorization and database-backed agents.
Co-presenter with Guru Sattanathan[4]