Nexla Blog

The Internet Archive, also known as the Wayback Machine, has been capturing snapshots of the World Wide Web for over 20 years. But a new effort to save a specific type of Internet content- scientific data- has emerged among some scientists and professors. Groups like the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities and its offshoot Data Refuge are committed to preserving “…the facts we need at a time of ongoing climate change.”

These groups encourage others to download and store public scientific data. They’ve acted as a catalyst for groups around the country to host data meetups. At Nexla, we are committed to building tools that make it easier to collaborate with data. In that spirit, we’d like to share two of the methods we’ve found for archiving important data sets.

When faced with a difficult question, mathematicians like to solve from first principles. Engineers get down to nuts and bolts. Most of us call it “going back to basics.” Letting go of assumptions and relying on fundamental concepts is a great way to find a clean, high quality solution to a difficult problem. As an engineer, I followed that approach in my work and as an entrepreneur, one of the first things the Nexla founding team did was to codify the core cultural values of our company. Those cultural values are our first principles, our nuts and bolts.

At Nexla, we think of APIs are belonging to one of two categories: service or data. A service API is a building block for a developer, a way to hook into another application’s functionality. It’s how developers can build apps in Slack, or add google maps to a web app. Data APIs on the other hand are a bit more limited. They allow developers to pull data from a source and then use that data however they see fit. They don’t offer any additional functionality or services. And that’s why they’re facing extinction.

Film buffs will remember the above scene from Stanley Kubrick’s iconic Dr. Strangelove, in which President Muffley says, “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!” The absurd, satirical line is oddly applicable to what’s happening today in machine learning teams. The machine learning folks shouldn’t be data wrangling- they should be focused on machine learning. But because we don’t often receive our data in a usable format, valuable time is spent transforming, moving, and cleaning data.

Automotive is the buzzing topic at CES 2017. That’s no surprise given the pace of innovation in vehicle connectivity and autonomy. But beyond the cool concept cars and live demos, CES discussed questions about safety, regulation, social impact, smart cities and how these new vehicles will change life and jobs as we know it. New vehicle technology has the opportunity to transform how we live, and save lives while doing it. But is the automotive industry ready for this challenge?

Welcome to the Nexla blog! We’re happy to debut our new blog and logo just in time for the AT&T Developer Summit and CES. We want to make it easier for companies to be able to collaborate with data, and for data engineers to do their jobs faster and with ease. We aim to simplify the complexity of data operations in the machine learning age. We wanted our logo to reflect this commitment to simplicity.