Heather Downing
Developer Advocate @ Yugabyte / Founder @ VennApps
Kansas City, Missouri, United States
Actions
Climbing the technology mountain and halfway up the side. Experience in .Net, Auth, and API development. Dabbles in iOT & databases. Focusing on coding for humans and choosing the right tool for the job.
Heather is a passionate coder and entrepreneur. She has experience working with Fortune 500 companies building enterprise level mobile and .Net applications. She spends her spare time at tech conferences supporting the growth of new developers of all genders, ages and backgrounds. When not coding, Heather spends her time as a competitive equestrian and learning the art of mounted archery.
Links
Badges
Area of Expertise
Topics
Your Agents Have Amnesia: Lessons from Building a Memory Layer for Multi-Agent Systems
Multi-agent systems have a data problem nobody warns you about. Agent B sees Agent A's final output and nothing else; the reasoning, the dead ends, and whatever Agent A figured out three steps in all get thrown away. So teams of agents re-learn the same lessons every run, and when something breaks, your observability stack tells you what an agent did without telling you what it learned or how that learning spread.
My team spent the past year building a shared memory and knowledge layer for production multi-agent systems, and we made most of the available mistakes. We wired a vector database to a graph database to a relational store and watched the seams leak: entity extraction running twice on the same conversation, a knowledge graph that quietly went stale every time a memory updated, serialization bugs living at the boundaries between stores. "Just share a Postgres table" sounded reasonable too, right up until agents needed isolation and selective sharing at the same time.
I'll walk through what survived. How we ended up with one query surface across vector, relational, and graph data. Why per-agent memory and shared knowledge have to be separate constructs, not one table with a scope column. What conversation-history tiering actually costs and saves, and how to keep an audit trail of what agents learned rather than only what they ran. The patterns transfer whether your stack is Postgres, a dedicated vector store, or something you already regret.
AI Agents Need Permission Slips
MCP servers connect AI agents to enterprise systems, but most examples aren't specific about what they have access to - they just assume you know. This works until your assistant decides to reorganize your file system or email your entire customer database. Turns out giving AI agents broad permissions is like giving a toddler car keys.
This session guides authorization for AI workflows beyond RBAC (Role-Based Access Control). We'll implement dynamic permission scoping, context-aware authorization, and most importantly, human approval gates for dangerous operations. You'll learn to build agentic workflows that are useful enough to deploy but constrained enough to trust with production data.
Imposter Syndrome: Overcoming Self-Doubt in Success
Impostor Syndrome almost killed my tech career. I've discovered a lot about what triggers me and the fallout from letting it take over your working life. I'll tell you my story, and the lessons I learned in order to overcome it. Think you aren't good enough? Let's talk about it.
The Care and Feeding of Software Engineers
After years of excellence as a developer who gets things done, you are rewarded with a leadership title and more responsibility. Only now you are expected to manage people and not just code. What motivated you to improve doesn't seem to always work on your team. So what do you do? We will explore the art of managing talented people and learning what the human needs for guidance and support from their leader.
The Visible Developer: Why You Shouldn't Blend In
Ever wonder how some technical people are recognized and promoted quicker than others with the same skillset? Yes, there is a formula to make it more likely. We will explore the habits of well known developers outside of their coding chops, to identify what additionally allowed them to become a trusted and known voice in their environment. This approach can be a benefit to you, no matter how junior or senior you are.
Øredev 2025 Sessionize Event
#HelloStavanger 2025 Sessionize Event
.NET Day Switzerland 2025 Sessionize Event
NDC Oslo 2025 Sessionize Event
NDC Melbourne 2025 Sessionize Event
NDC London 2025 Sessionize Event
Build Stuff 2024 Lithuania Sessionize Event
NDC Porto 2024 Sessionize Event
Devintersection and next GenAI Conference Sessionize Event
Copenhagen Developers Festival 2024 Sessionize Event
NDC Oslo 2024 Sessionize Event
NDC Sydney 2024 Sessionize Event
NDC London 2024 Sessionize Event
Build Stuff 2023 Lithuania Sessionize Event
DevConf 2023 Sessionize Event
Denver Dev Day | October 2023 Sessionize Event
Connectaha 2023 Sessionize Event
NDC Sydney 2022 Sessionize Event
NDC Oslo 2022 Sessionize Event
NDC Melbourne 2022 Sessionize Event
Techorama 2022 BE Sessionize Event
NDC London 2022 Sessionize Event
NDC Porto 2022 Sessionize Event
NDC Oslo 2021 Sessionize Event
Build Stuff 2021 Lithuania Sessionize Event
The Live Coders International Women's Day Challenge for Women Sessionize Event
NDC Oslo 2020 Sessionize Event
NDC London 2020 Sessionize Event
AntarctiConf 2020 Sessionize Event
Live! 360 Orlando 2019 Sessionize Event
NDC Sydney 2019 Sessionize Event
CDCD 2019 Sessionize Event
Techorama Netherlands 2019 Sessionize Event
Seattle CodeCamp 2019 Sessionize Event
KCDC 2019 Sessionize Event
NDC Oslo 2019 Sessionize Event
Techorama Belgium 2019 Sessionize Event
CodeStock 2019 Sessionize Event
Swetugg 2019 Sessionize Event
KanDDDinsky Sessionize Event
Techorama NL 2018 Sessionize Event
NDC Sydney 2018 Sessionize Event
KCDC 2018 Sessionize Event
NDC Oslo 2018 Sessionize Event
NDC London 2018 Sessionize Event
NDC Sydney 2017 Sessionize Event
Heather Downing
Developer Advocate @ Yugabyte / Founder @ VennApps
Kansas City, Missouri, United States
Links
Actions
Please note that Sessionize is not responsible for the accuracy or validity of the data provided by speakers. If you suspect this profile to be fake or spam, please let us know.
Jump to top