James Hays

Senior Staff Engineer, iOS

ForeFlight · Jeppesen

• Military Flight Bag TAK integration — Owned the iOS Team Awareness Kit work behind FFTAK in Military Flight Bag One: channel support, standards-aligned messaging, and production hardening through public release.
• Map Annotations 2.0 — Took the feature from inherited early design to ship in ForeFlight 18.5: built a new Swift package for it, staff-led the change stack and feature review, and hardened it behind release flags.
• Documents platform — Built and stewarded ForeFlight Mobile’s documents and PDF stack: enterprise document distribution, tabbed reading, Apple Pencil annotation, and about ten third-party PDF engine upgrades, including a move to Swift Package Manager.
• Sync and Core Data modernization — Moved dozens of Core Data models into dedicated Swift packages, migrated sync to async/await, and built a Core Data deadlock-detection system.
• Reliability — Created ForeFlight Mobile’s blameless postmortem program and runs release postmortems every cycle; diagnoses and fixes high-severity crashes and freezes, often as fast-turnaround patch releases.
• Code quality — Created five Swift packages, introduced SwiftLint, led app-wide modernization, and wrote the team’s Swift 6 concurrency and tech-debt guidance.
• AI-assisted engineering — Designed a spec-driven, human-gated process for multi-agent development and built team tooling for crash triage, review routing, and postmortem drafting. Writes the specs, sets the gates, reviews and tests every result, and makes the calls. Won “Most Shippable” at a company AI hackathon.
• Scale and leadership — A high-volume author and reviewer across a large, multi-team iOS codebase. Serves on iOS and product hiring panels, mentors engineers, and writes an ongoing series on engineering in the AI era.

Founder & Principal Architect

Hays Software Development LLC · since 2010

Expert iOS consulting, architecture, and full-lifecycle development for Fortune 500 companies, global and mid-sized enterprises, and startups. Focus: Swift/SwiftUI architecture, Objective-C to Swift migrations, GraphQL and REST integrations, team leadership, and Agile process improvements.

Selected client engagements

• Hyatt — Native iOS guest booking work in Swift and SwiftUI: partner offers across the booking and stay journey, loyalty milestone display, room selection, and a production crash fix in a guest-facing booking flow.
• Allegiant Airlines — Led rebrand and re-architecture: moved web views to native, designed a GraphQL layer to replace REST, and served as technical liaison among client, design, and development while mentoring Scrum practices.
• Expedia / Trover — Led a full rewrite of a legacy Objective-C app into a layered Swift architecture, enabling reusable components, stronger testability, and faster feature work across iOS and Android.
• Little Caesars — Engaged by the CTO to diagnose workflow issues, tighten Agile practices, architect features, and grow the iOS team, raising productivity and cutting defects.
• HSBC / IHS Markit — Built an enterprise iPad app for digital migration of investment books, applying Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines and internal standards.
• Agrium — Recruited and led a team to unify agriculture sales tools across recent acquisitions into one mobile sales platform.
• Point Clear Solutions / St. Jude Medical — Bluetooth medical-device integration with MVVM patterns that supported FDA validation.
• Klique — Redesigned social video app architecture and redeveloped the product for reusability and modern frameworks.
• Additional work includes Hangar 30 (military applications), Angie’s List, Equilibrium, and early social and educational apps such as Skill Champ.

Lead Developer

DigitHaus

• Delivered four income-producing social networking apps for Swakker, two patent applications, and numerous proofs of concept.
• Owned the full lifecycle: requirements, wireframes, iOS and web services, and server setup.
• Shipped Autonomy TeamSite solutions for clients including NFL.com, Sanofi-Aventis, and Loma Linda University.

Lead iOS Architect

Swakker LLC

• Led social networking iOS products end to end: requirements, wireframes, iOS and web services, and server work.
• Extended Openfire XMPP with custom plugins for richer profiles, SMS, and related capabilities.
• Stood up Hudson automated builds and JIRA so additional developers could join and ship quickly.

Earlier software engineering

Java / J2EE

Roles at Ball Aerospace (Sr. Software Developer), Synergetics (Sr. Java Developer / Developer), ADP, Physicians Mutual / Client Resources, ConAgra Foods, and United States Department of Agriculture (APHIS / NAIS). Work spanned Struts, Spring, Hibernate, EJB, Oracle, workflow systems, and large government and enterprise web applications.

eBoard Member & Volunteer Web Lead

Carter Lake Sailing Club · volunteer

• Site modernization — Brought the club’s WordPress site up to WordPress 7.1 and PHP 8.3, testing changes on staging first before pushing them live.
• Cleanup and security — Removed unused plugins, hardened site security, and confirmed weekly backups.
• Members-only access — Kept role-based, members-only pages working for members and boating members, and added a members-only minutes archive.
• Volunteer hours — Fixed the members’ Log Work Hours form so volunteer hours land in a Google Sheet.
• Club history — Added Sailing Through History, a series on the club’s past.

President & Vice President

FNL Pilots Association · volunteer

• Pilot advocacy — Represented general aviation pilots at Northern Colorado Regional Airport as president and, earlier, vice president.
• Airport planning — Held the pilots association’s seat on the airport’s Planning & Development Subcommittee, contributing to the 2020 Airport Master Plan and the 2023–24 Strategic Action Plan.
• Hangar redevelopment — Spoke for pilots at Airport Commission meetings on hangar redevelopment, pushing to keep hangar space for small aircraft owners and longer notice for tenants.
• Website and communications — Hosted and maintained fnlpilots.org through Hays Software as a donation, and ran member newsletters and online meetings through COVID.

• AOPA — Airport Support Network volunteer for FNL; Airport Support Representative, Loveland, Colorado
• Colorado Pilots Association — Area Representative
• Angel Flight West — Volunteer
• Civil Air Patrol — Senior member, Thompson Valley Composite Squadron

Autonomy Interwoven Component Developer Contest

DigitHaus winning entry for TeamSite SitePublisher: reusable “User Comments” social components. Named as the winning developer in the announcement.