Derek R
CTO at WalletConnect, Inc.
United Arab Emirates
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDerek R is a seasoned technology leader and CTO based in the United Arab Emirates with 12 years of engineering and leadership experience spanning startups and major platforms like Amazon and Venmo. He blends hands-on full-stack and mobile development with a pragmatic engineering ethos—KISS, YAGNI, and DRY guide his day-to-day decisions—while steering product and platform strategy at WalletConnect. Derek is an active open-source contributor, notably improving WalletConnect’s test automation, push notification integration for iOS, and UI/SIWE flows in onchain app tooling, reflecting his focus on reliability and developer experience. He pairs strong academic foundations from Technical University Munich and University of Helsinki with founder instincts from multiple startups, and is known for pragmatic, kind leadership both in code and culture.
12 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science, Information Systems, Bachelor of Science, Information Systems at Technical University MunichComputer Science, GPA 1.0 (best possible GPA), Computer Science, GPA 1.0 (best possible GPA) at University of Helsinki
German, English, French
Github Skills (27)
apn10
ios10
testing10
typescript10
user-notifications10
typescript-types10
swift10
playwright10
walletconnect10
typescripts10
react10
test-automation10
nextjs9
networking9
ethereum9
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
reown-com/appkit
Oct 2022 - Apr 2025
The full stack toolkit to build onchain app UX
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:165 reviews, 96 PRs, 224 pushes in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Derek implemented UI tests for the laboratory application, focusing on WalletConnect and other core features. They added a Sentry integration for error tracking and introduced UI tests for the connect flow, including handling session proposals and request approval. Further contributions include adding support for sign-in-with-ethereum (SIWE) flows, network switching, and email-based authentication. They also added various UI test improvements, and addressed minor issues.
integrationreactwidgetproviderwallets
WalletConnect/walletconnect-monorepo
Jul 2022 - Dec 2022
WalletConnect Monorepo
Role in this project:QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:74 reviews, 74 commits, 144 PRs in 5 months
Contributions summary:Derek's contributions primarily involve enhancing the test suite for the "sign-client" package within the WalletConnect monorepo. They addressed dependencies, added a canary test for continuous monitoring, and fixed load test compilation and parameter parsing issues. Furthermore, the user implemented push functionality tests and integrated metrics to analyze test results.
reactmonorepoethereumreact-nativewalletconnect
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