A few days ago I emailed to the OpenClaw team hoping to be considered for a maintaining role. That’s been the second such email I sent, the first one went straight to Peter Steinberger himself like at 4 o’clock in the morning without doing any kind of proof-reading.
Sadly, I haven’t gotten any response on either channel so far, so I fear that the ship has sailed. Compiling my achievements for the application made a feel a bit proud of what I am offering. Maybe I’ll feel a bit better by putting this letter out there.
Here’s an infographic I made just now, from the email below.
Hi OpenClaw Team,
I emailed previously directly to Peter about my interest in joining the maintainers, but I guess he didn’t see it. So I am doing it again – this time adhering to the format you outlined.
I currently max out 2 OpenAI codex team accounts, and one $200 anthropic subscription, building all kinds of skills, working on my many Swift projects and most imporantly reporting and trying to fix bugs in OpenClaw itself. Because of my fascination with voice for claw, I have an open PR with a lot of utility enhancements for the voice-call plugin.
1) Links to my PRs on OpenClaw
Here are my most recently open PRs:
- #20948 — propagate accountId from heartbeat delivery context to agent run
- #20294 — thread mediaLocalRoots through channel plugin dispatch
- #19073 — voice-call improvements (streaming TTS, barge-in, silence filler, hangup, config)
2) Links to open source projects I maintain
Here are my “most famous” projects, from a time before Swift:
I love Swift, so I started those several projects that have seen some initial interest and PRs.
I have the strong belief that developing in the open makes design better software and this is why I opensourced the majority of the skills I built for myself. I love the new VirusTotal feature that scans your code for security issue. This caused me to want to get all my skills to achieve a double “benign” rating.
While for the most part py is most portable for skills, I am still fascinated about the idea of having also Swift-based CLIs be used in skills, so this is my first foray in this area:
3) Handles
- GitHub: @odrobnik
- Discord: drops4827
- X/Twitter: @cocoanetics
4) About Myself
I’m Oliver Drobnik, and 13 years ago I turned indie developer focussing exclusively on Apple platforms. When Swift came out, I fell in love with the platforms a second time. I love to develop in the open because I believe that other people should benefit from the problems I am solving for myself. And with outside contributions edge cases and bugs get addressed that I wouldn’t have found myself. So it’s a win-win.
With OpenClaw I am working on automating many of the drudgeries of software development. I am servicing one main US-based client on Retainer. At the same time I want to extend the abilities of OpenClaw to some trusted friends with specialized sandboxed agents to work for them. There I am basically the system admin that makes sure the basic required skills are working for them. This also chimes with my interest in voice and realtime for OpenClaw. For many users I believe that having the ability to voice-call “their” agent is the killer unlock for them.
I bring a notable amount of experience in developing and maintaining OSS to the table, a strong interest in Swift and Agents. My main interest is developing agentic ways to help us maintainers deal with the flood of PRs that often try to achieve the same thing. There was this PR about running out of file descriptors causing exec not to work any more, and when I checked there were like a dozen open PRs addressing the same issue. I also love the strong focus on security and making OpenClaw more and more robust.
With my strong background in Swift and Apple platforms, I could support development there. Then there’s my curiosity in agent sandboxing and addressing sharp edges in these areas. But really, I am quite flexible, I’m interested to help out wherever you need me.
5) Languages and Location
- German (professional), English (professional)
- Based in Kittsee, Austria (Europe/Vienna time zone)
6) Time Commitment
My current time commitment ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■, with some ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■. But realistically I can devote about ■■■■■■ per month, i.e. around ■■■■■■ per week to being a maintainer on your team.
I hope that I have picquet your interest and that will soon hear from you.
kind regards
Oliver Drobnik
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Categories: Administrative