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…

After spending most of 2023 intensely studying written and spoken Japanese and networking towards on-site software roles in Tokyo, I made the difficult decision to change my mind and stay in San Francisco. Along that journey I had developed important friendships and relationships, and found an expansive and welcoming community for Magic: The Gathering, a hobby that has grown into a passion and a major part of my life.

Recently I’ve been exploring career options related to Magic and tabletop gaming more broadly, hoping to find the kind of direct and community-oriented work that I enjoyed during my time at Neighbor’s Corner café.

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.

Stillman Lab Data Analysis Contributions

During the Spring semester at San Francisco State University I worked with Dr. Jonathon Stillman and a group of talented graduate students on a review paper, Ecophysiological Responses to Heat Waves in the Marine Intertidal Zone.

Dr. Stillman wanted to know if it might be possible to use publicly available datasets to identify seasons and locations where low tide and peak sun exposure co-occurred, and how those factors contribute to intertidal heat waves. I began attending weekly class sessions and writing code to investigate this.

Using my background in data science at Stanford to work on a project with implications for conservation efforts was exciting, and I created a model of intertidal temperatures that compared very convincingly to recorded temperature data from a site on the California coast.

An image of a scatter plot comparing tide-scaled solar radiation and recorded temperatures at a coastal site.

Dr. Stillman was excited to include this result in the paper, which was recently accepted into the Journal of Experimental Biology!

Code notebook viewable in the project repository.

Nonograms

I was introduced to nonogram puzzles recently, and they reminded me of the kinds of problems you encounter on algorithm practice sites.

An image of a solved nonogram puzzle in the shape of a heart.

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:

A gif of a gray grid slowly being filled in with solved white and black tiles in the shape of a digital keyboard.

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 A gif of kanji character strokes separating and flowing around to turn into a new character, one after the other.

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 An image of a web interface for Spirit Island card creation.

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 An image of a canvas with perfectly concentric circles and lines painted on it in blue and green.

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 An gif of someone navigating through several Sankey diagrams populated with Visual Genome data.

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 A gif of a character in a video game moving around in a grid.

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 a gif of a 3D game with a character moving around blue cubes.

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