Vote on Treasury Withdrawal - IO - Developer Experience Initiative

I am voting to ABSTAIN on the governance action with hash 73e171a4c0730b4b59ecae271ab89f12a9d56360b02920e1f95107dbdc1d6762#0.

The metadata for my vote is located here, and this blog serves as a more human-readable form of that justification.

Justification

Initially, I planned to vote No on this proposal.

Historically, IO’s particular expertise has not been aligned with developer experience. Organizationally, they do fantastically robust engineering, but produce terrible user and developer experiences. This is not a criticism of IO: no organization can do it all. But if you look at their track record with Plutus, cardano-cli, breaking API changes, the PAB, etc. it is clear that having the people who build the core infrastructure also build the tools needed by the layer above them is a failing premise.

I believe that the proposal as written suffers from xkcd/927, it overlooks existing tools, built by companies already trying to solve these problems, convinced that this time will be different.

I would be much more supportive of a proposal that focused on:

• Hackathons, which historically IO has done well at organizing
• Providing assistance to existing tools, through engineers and deeper integration with infrastructure tools (as is already happening with UTXO RPC support in the node)
• Giving existing tools Discoverability and Legitimacy with an official endorsement

as I believe this would be a far more effective and higher leverage way to improve the developer experience for Cardano.

However, after discussing with the project manager assigned to this proposal, Robertino Martinez, I have decided to vote abstain instead.

It is clear that Robertino has a better perspective on this than his proposal implied, and he was receptive to my feedback. So while I can’t vote on this proposal as is, I also wouldn’t be heartbroken if it passed, as I believe Robertino could steer it in effective directions.

If the proposal fails, as seems the current trend, I would strongly support a revised proposal that focused on amplifying existing efforts.