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
Data Analysis / Python doi.org
Data Structures for Statistical Computing in Python
The classic paper introducing the pandas library to the scientific Python community, detailing the design of high-performance DataFrame data structures for analysis.
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.
AI arxiv.org
Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition
Introduced the ResNet architecture and residual connections, enabling the training of extremely deep neural networks by resolving the vanishing gradient problem.