James Rutherford

Code, Demoscene, and Personal Website

Upsell Corner

You can hire me. I live in North-East England and trade as creativenucleus.

I made Kick Cards, a physical deck of cards that startups can use to explore ideas.

I created a Demoscene workshop, a mix of coding skills and history, enthusiastically delivered. Please contact me if you'd like me to run one for you.

I'm available for creative tech projects - making interesting things with code. Previous personal highlights have included:

Binaudios
A collaboration with inventor Dominic Wilcox
130 Story
A daily creative writing challenge

Code

My main languages are:

  • Go: for CLI tools and network things.
  • Lua: for creative coding.
  • Node/JS/TS: When it fits!
  • Python: for RasPi/microcontrollers.

I also have decent experience in PHP, HTML/CSS, and SQL. And many more exotic / lesser used languages too.

I have a few public repositories in GitHub.

Demoscene

I've been a creative coder for much of my time. At the end of 2022, I became active in the demoscene, and it became a big part of my life.

You can find my contributions at my Demozoo, and Pouët profiles.

You can run some things online in the TIC-80 archive, though in the browser they may run slower than they should.
There are recordings in my YouTube playlist.

My group affiliation is RiFT, though I also enjoy collaborations outside that.

I have a strong interest in livecoding. You'll find some (mostly TIC-80) examples in my Demozoo Livecode archive.
I'm also playing with Strudel, and enjoying that.

I enjoy community building and making tools. Some notable projects include:

The Demoscene Workshop
I've open-sourced the materials, but I love to run this workshop, so please contact me if you'd like one!
TIC-80 sketches
Some source code from my doodles. Please feel welcome to play with them!
ByteJammer
A manager for livecoding across a network. Also a jukebox!
jtruk-timezoner.js
A small bit of code to scratch an itch I had - trying to figure out Demo party schedules for my timezone.
It's had some decent adoption.
TIC-80 Bundler
For gluing together multiple files for a TIC-80 release.

Other Interests

I enjoy gardening and growing, cooking, kamado taming, retrogaming (sweet spot: 1985-95), live comedy, coloured lighting, and adore a one-eyed cat.

I regularly attend The Science of Consciousness, travel to occasional demoparties, love to listen or dance to electronica / breakbeat / funk / disco, and had the time of my life at Electromagnetic Field.

Contact

My main social network account is jtruk / mastodon.social.

You can find my professional profile on LinkedIn. I don't keep it up-to-date, but I will respond!

I used to be very active on Twitter, but I don't monitor engagement there since it became X.
Here if you're interested in the archive: @jtruk.