Jamis Buck

The more I learn, the more I'm convinced that there's nothing that can't be learned.

Check it out on itch.io (jamisbuck.itch.io/totwsam) and DriveThruRPG (drivethrurpg.com/en/product/556…). Currently on sale for half off -- just $5!

Not software, but I made a thing: "That One Time We Solved a Mystery" is a solo/co-op framework for any TTRPG to play mysteries with no preparation. I'm thrilled with how it turned out! I've had playtesters say it made them feel like "real investigators" ❤️

@kamens Lovely write-up, and fascinating solution. Thank you for sharing!

@jamis I learned a ton from your book+blog when building this, thank you!

One of my goals when building @elbobooks was to be able to generate beautiful custom mazes based on any theme a kid might dream up. But mazes are a pathologically difficult case for AI image generation. I learned a ton about mazes and wrote about our solution (link in reply)

You can get half off all e-books at pragprog.com through Dec 1. This includes "Mazes for Programmers" and "The Ray Tracer Challenge", by yours truly. Use code "save50" 🧠💕

Joseph Grosso posted a very thorough (and glowing!) review of my book, "The Ray Tracer Challenge": @jogrosso/the-ray-tracer-challenge-learning-c-through-computer-graphics-e45a68fb7cd5" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">medium.com/@jogrosso/the-… -- includes tips for troubleshooting and optimizing your renderer!

Sentinel Comics RPG is an amazing system. I made a random character generator for it: jamisbuck.org/scrpg (repo: github.com/jamis/scrpg-ch…).

BASIC was developed in 1964. 31 years later, in 1995, Java came out. Here we are now, 30 years since Java's release, and it occurs to me that Java is now the BASIC of any language being developed today. 🤯

17 years?!?!

Playing with maze generation in Swift & SwiftUI, with the great book "Mazes for Programmers" by @jamis!

Generating mazes with the help of @jamis book "Mazes for Programmers". I am trying to re-create an oldie that I used to play in the 90s: Alcazar the Forgotten Fortress on the #MSX. I am doing it on the the #playdate

Just finished converting an ancient cvs repo of mine to git, finally. Thread on BlueSky: bsky.app/profile/jamisb…

@farsi_mehdi I remember that! I’m so glad I could be a part of your journey. ❤️

Today, my wife and I are celebrating 10,000 days since we were married! We’ve ordered a few Lego(-ish) sets with a combined total of at least 10k pieces to celebrate. Feel free to do likewise :)

@algriosa that sphere looks great!

@jpcamara I’ll check yours out too! I’d never used fibers before this solution, and I’m eager to learn more about practical applications

@jamis Sounds like an awesome talk! I’ll be at Ruby conf as well, speaking on fibers (and friends) in a concurrent context. I’ll definitely check this out!

I’m very excited to be speaking at RubyConf next month, with Adviti Mishra. We’ll be talking about how we used fibers in a non-concurrent context to fix a stack overflow error caused by recursion. Come say hi!

@neerajsingh0101 It was fantastic to chat with you! So fun to remember the SwitchTower days 👍

When capistrano was released I was blown away was how simple it was to deploy a Rails application. Before Capistrano I used to have a long cheat sheet listing step by step process. I was very curious to know how Capistrano worked and I looked over every single line of code. Imagine my surprise when I found myself standing next to @jamis . I was so happy to meet him. That’s was #RailsWorld is all about. Meeting wonderful people accidentally. Another thing about @jamis I should mention that his blog about “skinny controller fat model” weblog.jamisbuck.org/2006/10/18/ski… I shared with everyone joining @BigBinary those days. That practice itself removed lots of unnecessary debates. We talked about how initially capistrano was named “switch tower”. And later that company went bust. May be @dhh should have named Kamal “switch tower” to pay homage to the old times. All in all it was good talking about old days. Also I referred to Capistrano code a lot to see how to write good Ruby code.

@bbnnt @rails @MongoDB That’s the one! Still a work in progress, but it proves the concept and we will keep fleshing it out 👍

At @MongoDB, they wanted to add a tighter integration between #Rails and #Mongoid (their ODM), so they created their our own CLI tool that extends the Rails CLI, adding the additional functionality they sought. Join former Rails core alumnus and Capistrano-creator @jamis at #RailsWorld to see how they did it, and how you can do it yourself. rubyonrails.org/world/2024/day…

@rtkimz Walter Pullen talks about this algorithm on his "Think Labyrinth" website: puzzleu.com/class/mazes.ht… -- I'm afraid I don't know of any others (though I'm sure they exist).

@rtkimz Hey Robin, I'm afraid I only know of one algorithm for generating labyrinths, and it comes with a few caveats. Generate a perfect maze, first. Add a single exit. Then bisect every passage; you'll wind up with a single unbranching path.