About Me
Hello! I’m Raymond Bukaty, but everyone calls me Buck (he/him).
I’m a software engineer, most recently at Atlassian.
Check out my resume, or feel free to shoot me an email at hello@buckbukaty.com.
What I’ve been up to…
In the beginning of 2021 just after leaving Atlassian, if you had told me I’d end up working at a coffee shop in San Francisco and casually speaking Japanese with my coworkers, I’d be at least a little perplexed.
I’m very fortunate to have been able to take this career break to explore my hobbies, find new passions, and meet so many interesting people.
Now, having found a community and a sense of belonging, I’m ready to return to my software engineering career here in San Francisco, instead of Japan, my previous plan.
I’ve been challenged and I’ve learned a lot about myself during this time off, so with a new sense of what I bring to the table as a software engineer I’m excited to join a team where I can scale up my impact.
My Projects
These are some of the projects I’ve worked on for classes, internships, or for fun.
For professional skills, check out my resume.
Nonograms
I was introduced to nonogram puzzles recently, and they reminded me of the kinds of problems you encounter on algorithm practice sites.
It seemed like it would be fun to build a nonogram solver from scratch, so I intentionally didn’t look up any existing approaches and dove into the problem. In the process, I also ended up building a web scraper for a large online nonogram puzzle database to test my algorithm against.
I ended up with a pretty competent solver that only got stuck on inferences that weren’t obvious to me as a human (though I’m definitely a nonogram novice). It solved 87% of the ~4000 puzzles I scraped.
Here’s an animated example of a large, complex puzzle it was able to solve:
More info and examples in the project repository.
KanjiMorph
As I studied Japanese kanji characters, I wanted to make an art project involving kanji. I imagined them flowing between each other with “living” strokes.
So, here’s KanjiMorph! It’s a custom animation algorithm I wrote that morphs between kanji characters by moving their individual strokes. To see it in action, look below for some of the kanji I was studying as I worked on the algorithm!
Additional demo here.
April 2023
SpiritForge
Another project I worked on towards the beginning of my career break in 2022 was SpiritForge, a web tool I made with a friend to streamline the process of making custom content (cards and spirits) for the board game Spirit Island.
Check it out here.
2022
Generative Art
I had a lot of fun taking a class called Drawing with Code at Stanford, and since then I’ve been inspired to make more generative art.
Recently I bought an Axidraw pen plotter, which I’ve been able to use to create some very unique paintings.
Album here.
Ongoing
VG-Relations
I made a neat visualization of Ranjay Krishna’s “Visual Genome” dataset while I was interning with him at the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab.
Check it out here.
Summer 2018
CoNBot
Worked with a project partner on an AI game-playing agent for the game Crypt of the NecroDancer as my final project for CS231N: Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition. I wrote a nice summary article about what we did, which links to the code and our report+poster.
Check it out here.
Spring 2018
Laser Lair
A 3D puzzle game about using robots to get through a booby-trapped puzzle lair, made for CS248: Interactive Computer Graphics.
Check it out here.
Winter 2018
Boundless Mind
I was a web dev intern at early stage company Boundless Mind, and I designed and constructed a web-based Business Intelligence dashboard for the sales team.
See a sample.
Summer 2017
SplatterVR
As a freshman, I participated in Stanford TreeHacks with 3 friends. We built a simple, fun VR experience for the HTC Vive in which you splatter paint around a massive white room.
Check it out here.
Winter 2017