Derek Leung
Research Assistant at UC Berkeley
Berkeley, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDerek Leung is a research-focused software engineer with 14 years of experience building backend systems and developer tooling from Berkeley. As a Research Assistant at UC Berkeley he has worked on IDEs for CS education, implementing authentication and logging for an Eclipse plugin (EduRide), and brings practical experience shipping education-focused tooling. He contributes to prominent open-source infrastructure—most notably improving Algorand’s official Go implementation by enhancing debugging, reducing memory footprint for large state files, fixing concurrency in account updates, and optimizing transaction pool and block assembly paths. Based in Berkeley and active in the MIT PDOS community, he blends rigorous academic grounding in mathematics and computer science with hands-on systems work. He’s comfortable navigating complex concurrency and performance tradeoffs and has a track record of turning research ideas into production-ready code.
14 years of coding experience
Bachelor of Arts (BA), Mathematics and Computer Science, Bachelor of Arts (BA), Mathematics and Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley
Github Skills (8)
go10
blockchain10
concurrency10
data-structure9
algorithm9
data-structures9
algorithms9
testing8
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
algorand/go-algorand
Jun 2019 - Aug 2020
Algorand's official implementation in Go.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 reviews, 55 commits, 147 PRs in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Derek focused on implementing and improving the core functionality of the Algorand implementation in Go. Their work involved adding streaming support to the coroner debug tool, optimizing memory footprint for large cadaver files, and removing unsupported features. The user also addressed concurrency issues in account updates and refactored the code for catchup tests. They also updated the transaction pool and block assembly logic, increasing performance.
golangblockchainalgorand
derbear/steal
Sep 2019 - Aug 2020
Contributions:73 commits, 52 pushes, 6 branches in 11 months
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