Pandas to Polars: Why Speed Matters for Finding the Truth
You can't ignore the performance advantage of Polars anymore. Moving from Pandas' in-place mutations to Polars' declarative expressions lets you verify truth across much larger datasets.
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Val Data
Data insights, analytics, and technical explorations.
I’m Dominick Ryan, a systems and IT operations engineer. I build dependable cloud foundations, automate administrative overhead through code, and profile compute, security, and lifecycle trade-offs across distributed environments. This site documents systems benchmarks, operational architectures, and technical postmortems from platforms I maintain. There are also some personal opinions and musings, which you are free to ignore, embrace, or rail against as suits you.
My Posts
PEP 686: Python Finally Kills the Windows Locale Default
Python 3.15 makes UTF-8 the default across all platforms. Legacy PowerShell 5.1 can still get in the way.
Air-Gap Your AI for Fun and Safety: When Local Models Make the Most Sense
How a hybrid workflow pairing basic Python pre-filtering with a local, air-gapped AI model turned an unmanageable 40 MB production log dump into an actionable root-cause analysis.
Interactive Projects & Tools
Live Transit & Weather
BMT Brighton Line Tracker
Real-time MTA arrival tracking, live weather commute alerts, and historical performance diagnostics for the Q and B corridor.
Launch Tracker →
Macroeconomic Modeling
Housing Market Simulation
Interactive computational model simulating regional listing volumes, inventory absorption, foreclosure rates, and market pricing.
Run Simulation →
Physics & Complexity
Boids Flocking
Observe emergent complexity through three simple steering rules: Separation, Alignment, and Cohesion in a real-time vector canvas.
Launch Simulation →My Reading List
Databases infolab.stanford.edu
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
The original paper by Google's founders describing the architecture of their prototype search engine, introducing the PageRank algorithm and early web indexing structures.
Genomics / CRISPR doi.org
A Programmable Dual-RNA–Guided DNA Endonuclease in Adaptive Bacterial Immunity
The landmark study demonstrating that the CRISPR/Cas9 system can be programmed to cut specific DNA sequences, laying the foundation for modern gene editing.
studenttheses.universiteitleiden.nl
The Rigged Monopoly Game: Observer's Attributions and Reactions to Unequal Allocation of Resources
This study examines how observers perceive and react to unequal resource allocation through the lens of a rigged Monopoly game, providing insights into attitudes towards economic inequality and resource distribution.