Heynow Software was founded by Jay Koutavas, a long time Macintosh and Unix enthusiast.
Jay got his start in programming in 1974 at the tender young age of 12. By 1978, he was not only the first kid on the block to own an Apple II computer, but also was literally the only person in his midwestern town to own a personal computer. Jay's interests in professionally developing software go all the way back to those pioneering times. He completed his first software development work for hire at age 16.
By age 23, already having produced several business software products, he became the technical lead for the "Apple Classroom of Tomorrow" project in the public school in Blue Earth, Minnesota, which resulted in a number of awards for excellence for the school.
In 1986 he began working for Digital Equipment Corporation's Macintosh software development group. There Jay honed his skills in the science of software engineering and quality assurance. Both of these skill sets proved invaluable, as the user base for products Jay developed and tested were now counted in the tens of thousands of users. It was during his time at Digital that Jay got his first exposure to Unix and to development of network file servers. Jay developed a reputation at Digital as a "guy who gets stuff done" — a reputation that has followed him as he has progressed through his career.
In 1992, Jay got his first glimpse of the Avid Media Composer — a bleeding edge Macintosh application that allowed film and video editors, for the first time ever, to edit by cutting, copying, and pasting their media. Jay saw the potential in this immediately and joined up with Avid. He enthusiastically contributed to the user interface and various internal components of the Media Composer.
Avid grew from less than 200 employees to over 1100 in the first year of Jay's employment there. Within Avid, an interest in developing network-based media sharing was growing and Jay was tapped to be technical lead for two key early developments. He implemented significant parts to the Avid Transfer Tool, a Macintosh-based application for efficiently moving media on peer-to-peer networks. He also led the development of the Avid Media Server, a first of its kind Unix-based server that could handle real-time editing of up to 12 streams of high resolution media. The Avid Media Server was deployed in a number of 24x7 news rooms in the country. Jay's work on the Media Server also landed him his first patent.
In 1996, with a considerable engineering background established, Jay decided it was time to strike out on his own, and formed his own software development consulting business called "Heynow Software". Through Heynow he has helped ship a whole pile of commercial Macintosh and iPhone apps for customers, while also making room for the odd side project.
In 2007, under the alias xdog, Jay whipped up A Series of Tubes — an Apple TV app that put YouTube on the original Apple TV before Apple had an official SDK for writing apps on the thing. He built it using the AwkwardTV reverse-engineering tools the hacker community had put together for BackRow. He filmed a casual living-room demo of it himself (that's his voice in the YouTube clip). The thing hit Digg, then the Mac tech sites of the day, and a San Jose Mercury News reporter came looking for who xdog really was — somehow landing Jay's name in print alongside Steve Jobs and Google's CEO of the time. Brief, very specific fifteen minutes of Internet fame.
Longer-running still is Savitar, a Macintosh client for MUDs, MUSHes, MOOs, and other text-based online worlds. Jay first shipped it in the 1990s as shareware, and after a long stretch where the old app couldn't keep up with modern Macs, he's bringing it back as Savitar 2 — free, open source, and still very much Savitar. He recently checked in about it with the folks on r/MUD.
Around the mid-2010s, through Heynow, Jay landed a contract helping re-architect version 3.0 of Fidelity Investments' personal investing iOS app — a genuinely large codebase, the kind of mobile work where design, engineering, management, and QA all have to pull in the same direction, with multiple engineering teams spanning the US and India. Getting a crack at software of that scale still puts a grin on his face.
These days Jay is Chief Architect of Aura Labs at Aura. He was the first mobile engineer on the scene when the place was still small, and stayed on as the company grew from a scrappy early team into a big engineering organization — introducing React Native along the way and helping the mobile work keep its feet under it through that growth. The day job is architecture and shipping; nights and weekends, he's still poking at independent software and curious about whatever comes next.
Jay's resume can be found here, and you can contact him at the Heynow contact page.
