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.
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Val Data
Data insights, analytics, and technical explorations.
Iām Dominick Ryan, a data and systems engineer. I design reliable data pipelines, profile compute and memory trade-offs, and build targeted software to solve concrete operational problems. This site documents benchmarks, pipeline migrations, and technical postmortems from projects and systems I have built and/or actively maintain. There are also some personal opinions and musings which you are free to ignore or embrace or rail against as it may suit you.
My Posts
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.
Don't Call Me If You're a Quitter
Reflections on history, economic friction, and resilience while walking the streets of Tbilisi.
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 →
Procedural Game Engine
Vault Runner
A rogue-like procedural dungeon escape built with custom React state machines, turn-based mechanics, and real-time canvas rendering.
Play Game →My Reading List
Databases seas.upenn.edu
A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks
Codd's seminal paper introducing the relational model for databases, establishing concepts like relations, domains, keys, and normalization that revolutionized modern database design.
Data Analysis / Book wesmckinney.com
Python for Data Analysis (2nd ed.)
A comprehensive handbook by pandas creator Wes McKinney, detailing essential techniques for data manipulation, cleaning, exploratory analysis, and visualization in Python.
Data Analysis / Tools pandas.pydata.org
pandas (project)
The open-source project documentation and repository home for pandas, the foundational data analysis and manipulation library for the Python programming language.