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.
Next 
Val Data
Data insights, analytics, and technical explorations.
I’m 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
Distributed Systems allthingsdistributed.com
Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store
Details Dynamo, Amazon's highly available, decentralized key-value storage system utilizing consistent hashing and eventual consistency to achieve masterless replication.
AI arxiv.org
Attention Is All You Need
The groundbreaking paper that introduced the Transformer architecture, replacing recurrent and convolutional networks with self-attention and forming the foundation of modern Large Language Models.
Distributed Systems static.googleusercontent.com
MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters
Google's classic paper defining MapReduce, a programming model and implementation for processing large-scale datasets in a parallel, distributed manner on large commodity clusters.