Bogdan Fotescu

About me

I'm a software engineer with a strong focus on AI and full-stack product development. I build AI-powered applications end-to-end, from LLM integration and prompt engineering to backend APIs and polished frontend interfaces. Experienced shipping production systems across AI tooling, SaaS platforms, and blockchain infrastructure.

Driven by curiosity and a bias for building things that actually work.

Currently

I've spent nearly 3 years at BlockTac, responsible for everything from AI application development and LLM integrations to a blockchain-based certificate platform built on Polygon. I've integrated OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and other LLMs into production applications, built voice AI agents with tool-calling, and shipped full product systems end-to-end.

Outside of that I'm building DreamTale, an AI storytelling app for children. A prompt becomes a personalized story where kids steer the direction at each chapter, illustrated and streamed in real-time. OpenAI handles the story, Gemini the art.

What drives me

Before engineering, I spent years helping people develop soft skills like leadership, communication, working through fear, and reading group dynamics. Mostly with kids of all ages, but also with adult teams from large companies and professionals with established careers.

But kids shaped how I think about building the most. Spending time around them reminds you of something you start forgetting as an adult: that curiosity is supposed to pull you forward, that learning is supposed to feel like discovering. I've seen how their eyes spark when something new opens up in front of them, when they hear a story they actually want to hear, when a possibility clicks into place.

That's the feeling I try to build from. I want my eyes to spark with the same curiosity when I'm making something come to life, that same pull toward figuring out how it works, where to take it next, what else it could be. Good builders, I think, keep some of that alive in themselves. The part that gets excited about what's possible and still believes you can make almost anything you can imagine.

A lot of what I make traces back to it. I want to create things that adapt to whoever's using them, that make someone's day a little better, that matter to at least one person. Products and tools that carry some of the same spark I saw in kids, for anyone who uses them. DreamTale is one of those. The kind of thing I would have lost my mind over at seven years old.

The rest is curiosity, ambition, and an inability to leave something alone until it works the way I think it should.

Other things

I was born in Moldova, grew up in a small town in the Pyrenees, and have been in Barcelona for about 5 years. I speak Spanish, Catalan, Romanian, and English. Not by design, just how life happened. I've played piano for about 10 years, and I sometimes put on full classical music when I want to code in real flow mode.

I like books. I used to devour fantasy (The Name of the Wind got me into reading and is still the best thing I've ever read), and these days I lean more toward self-development and psychology. I enjoy understanding how things actually work underneath.

I've always been drawn to people with unlikely combinations, the ones whose range doesn't quite add up on paper. The fighter who paints. The skeptic who still prays sometimes. The lawyer who runs ultramarathons. The most interesting people I've met tend to be walking contradictions, and I think that's where the good stuff comes from. The sum of things that shouldn't go together is usually more than the parts.

There's also something I bought once because the idea of someone else owning it felt unacceptable.