Applicant Information
- Name of Applicant & Applicant’s Representative (If applicable): Andrei Voinea
- Telegram Handle (if applicable): Telegram: Contact @andreiveth
- Twitter/X Handle (if applicable): x.com
- LinkedIn Profile (if applicable): https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreivcodes/
- Github Profile: andreivcodes (Andrei Voinea) · GitHub
- The role being applied for (choose ONLY one):
- Dev Tooling on One and Stylus.
- Pitch Slides: andreiv.com
Background & Skills
Hello everyone, I’m Andrei and I’m a developer.
I’m a cofounder of proposals.app, a project we’ve been thinking about for a while and recently started building, and which won the Arbitrum ETHcc GovHack last July. proposals.app also got a grant from the “New Protocol and Ideas” questbook domain last October, where I’ve experienced first hand the application process and the ongoing grant process, a grantee goes through on this program.
Previously, I was a cofounder of Senate, a DAO tooling startup where we built DAO proposal notifications for Aave and Uniswap and for every DAO delegate that would subscribe to our email notifications. We raised close to $1m USD in the summer of 2023, but then realized the market timing was not right for it.
I got into web3 through StakeborgDAO (which is not really a DAO anymore), where I met a lot of cool local romanian people that am still friends with. This is also where I became interested in the DAO space. Soon after that, I became a member of DeveloperDAO and contributed to the CODE token claim website.
My background and lifelong passion is software engineering. I started my career as a firmware developer at a railway company and after finishing my university studies I worked for 6 years at a top tier1 automotive manufacturer as a senior firmware developer, where I was working on autonomous driving, more specifically, on the software stability of radars which are probably used in millions of cars on the road today.
While following Arbitrum because of proposals.app I got more involved in the technical governance issues of Arbitrum DAO. And because I’m also a big rust fanboy, it only made sense for me to get involved in the Arbitrum Hackathon for Stylus in Bucharest, where I was a mentor, judge and held a technical 4 hour workshop on stylus, which was the first public in-person workshop on Arbitrum Stylus worldwide and the project that won the hackathon was praised by Offchain Labs CEO on x.com.
Domain Related Experience and Vision
Throughout my career and freelancing I’ve experienced quite a bit of dev tools, from closed source big corporate tools to the latest web bleeding edge technologies, writing code from embedded C for the automotive radars firmware to NextJS 15 and 
rust on the nightly build for proposals.app.
Last year I gave a talk about developer experience at NFT Bucharest, where I argued that good application user experience can only come through good protocol developer experience. This is the reason I am applying for this track, and I believe a developer like myself, which is also ultimately a potential end user of the projects coming out of the program, should be the one deciding grant allocations for a developer tooling grants program.
Grant related Experience
I think the DA for Dev Tooling on One and Stylus should understand that good developer tools are notoriously hard to build. Good DX is nothing like good UX and it cannot be researched in the same way. You cannot do usability testing with the users of your library or API, and in most cases, you don’t even know who they are.
A good proposal should be able to convince me that the candidate understands the obscurity of this problem space, and through their experience with other tools, they have the skills to find a good way out. When I say convince me, it might seem dictatorial, but I actually mean it in a skeptical way. Throughout many years of software development, I experienced some good dev tools, but also a lot of bad ones. I believe growing the ecosystem cannot be done by throwing as many dev tools at it as possible. I firmly believe developer tooling is a matter of quality over quantity.
Declaration of Conflict of Interest
I am one of the cofounders of proposals.app, which got a $43,000 grant through Questbook in a multisig wallet which I am a signer of.
I was paid $1,720 for the Arbitrum Stylus workshop in Bucharest.
Our GovHack prize was $6,000 which was split between the two members of the team.