Connor Faulkner

The Collected Works of

Connor Faulkner

Systems that run while I sleep.

The engines turn in the dark, and the dark

keeps its own ledger. Come morning

he reads what the night has counted,

and calls this sleep.

— Annals of the Night Shift, Vol. I
View CV Email me

29/31 councils reporting · rebuilt nightly 04:30 UTC · built 2026-10-24 09:03 UTC

prologue

I'm a data scientist in Dublin. I take questions from raw data to production — ML research at one end, a live SaaS watching planning applications across 31 Irish councils at the other, built under Archaic, my studio. The chart is real, and it will rebuild itself tonight whether or not anyone is watching.

planning applications · last 14 days

live

Planning applications lodged per day, 2026-10-10 to 2026-10-23 (1196 total)
2026-10-10 2026-10-23

1196 applications lodged across 31 councils · updated 2026-10-24 09:03 UTC

the campaign map

Map of Ireland's 31 local authorities shaded by planning applications lodged in the last 30 days. Busiest: Cork County with 273. Carlow: 40 in the last 30 days Cavan: 75 in the last 30 days Clare: 99 in the last 30 days Cork City: 63 in the last 30 days Cork County: 273 in the last 30 days Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown: 99 in the last 30 days Donegal: 216 in the last 30 days Dublin City: 114 in the last 30 days Fingal: 0 in the last 30 days Galway: 184 in the last 30 days Galway City: 65 in the last 30 days Kerry: 140 in the last 30 days Kildare: 125 in the last 30 days Kilkenny: 66 in the last 30 days Laois: 102 in the last 30 days Leitrim: 30 in the last 30 days Limerick: 150 in the last 30 days Longford: 41 in the last 30 days Louth: 80 in the last 30 days Mayo: 110 in the last 30 days Meath: 131 in the last 30 days Monaghan: 71 in the last 30 days Offaly: 66 in the last 30 days Roscommon: 63 in the last 30 days Sligo: 51 in the last 30 days South Dublin: 67 in the last 30 days Tipperary: 123 in the last 30 days Waterford: 100 in the last 30 days Westmeath: 65 in the last 30 days Wexford: 0 in the last 30 days Wicklow: 106 in the last 30 days
Being a survey of the thirty-one local authorities 2915 applications in the last 30 days · jade = busiest council · data 2026-10-24 · boundaries: Tailte Éireann (CC BY 4.0)

the full survey → PlanningWatch

iprincipal characters

PlanningWatch

31 councils · nightly

31 Irish councils tracked nightly; 29/31 reporting recent activity; busiest: Cork County (273 applications)

29/31 reporting

A live SaaS that tracks every planning application in Ireland. Nightly ingestion, per-council health checks, an API with webhooks, and paying users. The hero chart above is its data.

read more →

Trading ML research

24% → ~50% win rate

Confidence filter raises win rate from 24% unfiltered to approximately 50% filtered unfiltered 24% filtered ~50%

filter on

An XGBoost confidence filter trained on 3,033 historical signal outcomes. It doubles win rate by dropping low-confidence signals before they reach the executor. The failed strategies are documented too.

read more →

Physics-LLM research

5 directions · 9 experiments

9 experiments across 5 physics-inspired GPT-2 compression directions; best result — entropy-based quantization — beat uniform quantization by 2.6x

2.6× vs uniform

Testing whether thermodynamics, renormalization group flow, and mean-field theory can guide LLM compression. Entropy-based quantization came out 2.6× better than uniform on GPT-2.

read more →

live planningwatch.ie — Irish planning applicationssalaries.ie — Irish salary benchmarksroleup.ie — an Irish job board

iifrom the annals

Spin: a Live Ising Model You Cool by Scrolling research
An Epic-Fantasy Tome in Zero JavaScript blog
Four Months Later: What Survived blog
Irish Software Deserves Better blog
What Built To Last Means blog

the fallen — experiments that didn't make it

iiiglossary, abridged

ML & data — Python, XGBoost, PyTorch, pandas, PostgreSQL

Engineering — Django, Rust, Docker, TimescaleDB, CI/CD

Product — Stripe, programmatic SEO, analytics, technical writing

ivcorrespondence

If this looks like your kind of colleague, the CV has the full picture.