About Me

I am Dominick Ryan, a Senior Systems and Data Engineer focused on architecting reliable, high-performance data transformations and cloud infrastructure. With over a decade of experience across systems engineering and technical consultancy, I bridge the gap between complex legacy environments and modern, analytics-ready data lakehouses.

Core Philosophy

So much of what I have built has been made possible by the mentors I’ve worked with and the open-source community. This blog, NextValData, is my curated store of the academic and technical documentation I've gathered along the way. It is a self-interested attempt to document the projects I’ve thought deeply about, as well as a way to share that knowledge back with the engineering community.

Technical Expertise & Strategy

I specialize in solving high-stakes business challenges through modern data architecture. My approach is platform-agnostic, spanning Azure, GCP, and AWS, with a deep focus on scalability and data quality.

Architecture & Orchestration

I implement Medallion Architecture (Bronze/Silver/Gold) to ensure data reliability and use Dagster and Spark for robust orchestration.

Data Platforms

Extensive experience building lakehouses using Microsoft Fabric, Databricks, Snowflake, and Apache Iceberg.

High-Performance Compute

I leverage Polars and PySpark for performance-critical transformations and explore GPU-accelerated processing (CUDA/RAPIDS) to achieve 70x speedups over traditional CPU workloads.

Engineering Standards

I utilize Event-Driven Microservices to build real-time, scalable data services that unlock immediate business value.

Industry Impact: Healthcare & Beyond

Much of my specialized work focuses on Healthcare Data Integration, where technical reliability directly impacts operational outcomes.

Operational Efficiency: For LHCSAs and home health care agencies, I built data solutions that resolved delayed payment cycles and streamlined legacy EDI transactions.
Interoperability: I have specific expertise in HHA Exchange and transitioning legacy on-prem systems to modern FHIR-based cloud solutions.
Infrastructure Scale: I previously built and maintained a data platform integrating APIs from over 2,000 devices to provide real-time support desk metrics, ensuring high-availability monitoring for critical infrastructure.

Professional Certifications

Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104)
Microsoft Certified: Azure Virtual Desktop Specialty (AZ-140)

Featured Projects

Interactive Housing Simulation (React)

An agent-based dynamics simulation built with React and Astro to visualize how supply and demand policies affect market outcomes.

GPU vs CPU Benchmarking

A deep dive into RAPIDS and the CUDA Toolkit, achieving significant performance gains in ETL workloads.