About

J. Aaron Farr

CTO, Co-Founder of Jam & Tea Studios — building AI-native games.

What I Write About

• AI + Games: The intersection of machine learning and game development
• Game Development: From video games to tabletop RPGs
• AI/ML Engineering: Practical lessons from building with AI/ML
• Occasionally: Engineering leadership, startups, open source practices

⊕ I’m a father and husband living in Los Angeles. Some know me from my soujourn in Hong Kong, Taiwan and other parts of China. I had the privilege of being an early contributor, and board member, of the Apache Software Foundation. These days, I build games and tech as part of Jam & Tea Studios

Elsewhere

• Jam & Tea Studios
• Playing with Inference Podcast
• LinkedIn
• Bluesky
• GitHub
• Discord: cautomaton

Colophon

This site uses a custom Hugo theme called tint, inspired by Edward Tufte’s principles of information design: wide margins for sidenotes, clean typography, and a bias toward functional clarity over decoration.⊕ The lineage: Dave Liepmann’s tufte-css, Dirk Eddelbuettel’s tint R package, then rewritten for Hugo with a different typographic foundation.

Typography is built on the iA Writer font family: The iA Writer fonts are themselves derived from IBM Plex, modified for writing-focused use.

• iA Writer Quattro (body) — a “near-proportional” face: monospace bones with proportional spacing.
• iA Writer Duo (headings) — duospace, where most glyphs are monospaced but m and w get 1.5x width.
• Fira Code (code blocks) — with programming ligatures.

All fonts are self-hosted. No CDN, no tracking. Dark mode follows your system preference via CSS media query. Sidenotes collapse to toggles on mobile using pure CSS — no JavaScript involved. Try resizing your browser.

Cellular Automata

A cellular automaton is a model of computation represented by a grid of cells and rules about how those cells interact with one another.

The animated strip below the header is a Conway’s Game of Life simulation running on a canvas element, the site’s only JavaScript. Each page load seeds the grid with a randomly chosen classic pattern,⊕ The seed library includes the R-pentomino, Acorn, Diehard, Thunderbird, Gosper glider gun, and others. The caption in the corner links to whichever pattern is running. scattered in multiple copies with a light dusting of random cells so they interact and evolve unpredictably.

The glider in the site logo is the same reference: the smallest Game of Life pattern that moves.

“Cautomaton” = cellular automaton. I follow simple rules. Complexity ensues.