Duncan Dean
Software Engineer at Second
Gauteng, South Africa
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDuncan Dean is a software engineer with a decade of experience building Bitcoin and web infrastructure, currently contributing to the Lightning Network and working at Second. With a foundation in physics and mathematics from the University of Pretoria, he brings rigorous problem-solving to low-level Rust development and NixOS-based tooling. He has a history of shipping production-grade web platforms—leading PWA efforts and TypeScript AST transformations at Luno—and now focuses on core Lightning functionality in rust-lightning, including protocol-level fixes for MPP and invoice expiry. As founder of Nexed he blends embedded hardware and freedom-tech instincts with open-source collaboration as a Btrust grantee. Based in Gauteng, South Africa, he pairs deep systems expertise with curiosity-driven pursuits like hiking and learning Japanese and Korean. A pragmatic engineer, he often bridges low-level protocol work and practical product needs, making subtle protocol improvements that improve real-world reliability.
10 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Matric, Matric at Sutherland High SchoolUniversity of Pretoria
English, Afrikaans, Japanese, German, Korean
Stackoverflow
71reputation
5kreached
2answers
1question
Github Skills (21)
back-end-development10
lightning-network10
bitcoin10
bitcoins10
cryptography10
error-handling10
rust10
data-structure9
algorithm9
algorithms9
data-structures9
apidoc8
api8
html6
firebase6
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
lightningdevkit/rust-lightning
Oct 2021 - Nov 2022
A highly modular Bitcoin Lightning library written in Rust. It's rust-lightning, not Rusty's Lightning!
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1070 reviews, 18 commits, 55 PRs in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Duncan primarily focused on enhancing the core functionality of the rust-lightning library. Their contributions include refactoring the `NetworkGraph` to replace the `PublicKey` with `[u8; 33]`, adding handling for MPP timeouts and invalid onion payload errors. The user also implemented handling for MPP receive timeouts. Moreover, they extended the functionality of phantom and non-phantom invoices by adding invoice expiry.
rustyrustlightninglightning-networkbitcoin
dunxen/rust-lightning
May 2021 - Apr 2025
A highly modular Bitcoin Lightning library written in Rust. Its Rust-Lightning, not Rusty's Lightning!
Contributions:18 PRs, 501 pushes, 131 branches in 3 years 10 months
rustyrustlightninglightning-networkbitcoin
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