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Having just gone through an evaluation for platforms just like Nextjournal, there are a lot of companies that make similar claims, but very few that deliver in

Having just gone through an evaluation for platforms just like Nextjournal, there are a lot of companies that make similar claims, but very few that deliver in reality. In the end, the only one we found that delivered on the promises of reproducibility and managing the entire data science life cycle end to end, facilitating collaboration, and getting stuff done was Domino Datalab[1]. Can you compare and contrast Nextjournal to DD? Better yet, do you feel you're competing in the same areas or are you really more focused just on reproducibility? Even if you're not now, it feels like eventually, all these types of products seem to converge to this state eventually just by nature of the sales process and promising more and more features to customers. Regardless, it looks really solid, so best of luck! [1]: https://www.dominodatalab.com/ https://www.dominodatalab.com/

linkingday 7y ago
I'm currently working on implementing this same sort of platform at an FI. Most of these vendors have the same exact product, give or take a few key features (like visual programming with Dataiku, cloud/on-prem hosting, etc.). The biggest thing that I've seen that is missing from almost all of them is a robust data ingestion and transformation engine. THAT'S what I'm interested in seeing.
pmarkovics 7y ago
Hi, I’m one of the founders of Nextjournal. I haven’t tried Domino Datalab so I can’t give you a comparison but I can speak to the vision of Nextjournal: We market towards Data Science because our feature set (automatic versioning, reproducibility, collaboration, etc) applies very well to many pain points currently existing in the field. But Nextjournal is not limited to Data Science. We designed it as a general purpose literate programming environment that should be able to address many different use cases: generative art, cloud APIs, spreadsheet-like applications, molecular dynamics simulations, you name it. The way we want to achieve this is by allowing people to extend Nextjournal eventually, by bringing their own languages and by implementing their own components that can be used in a notebook and shared with other users (e.g. a spreadsheet component or a task board component). We are already building some parts of Nextjournal with Nextjournal, like our component for cloning GitHub repositories into a notebook. We think this will eventually make the platform, as a whole, much more understandable and learnable and will give our users much more agency in what they want to accomplish.
kvlr 7y ago
I haven't tried Domino Datalab myself so take this with a grain of salt. While data science is an obvious use case of literate programming, it's not the only one. I see the fundamental problem that needs to be addressed is one of dependency management. We address this today using Docker. In the future we plan to use a more functional approach most likely based on Nix or Guix. This more principled approach should address both reproducibility and usability (by allowing to compose images and providing much better install times thanks to binary caching). I haven't really used Domino Datalab but I'm not sure if they allow for the installation of arbitrary system libraries and packages like we do. Check out some out our machine learning samples which run on GPUs: https://nextjournal.com/collection/machine-learning https://nextjournal.com/collection/machine-learning In the future we also plan to allow in-browser JavaScript execution, this is currently hidden behind a feature flag but we still have an article that uses it in https://nextjournal.com/dubroy/ohm-parsing-made-easy https://nextjournal.com/dubroy/ohm-parsing-made-easy

linkingday 7y ago

I'm currently working on implementing this same sort of platform at an FI. Most of these vendors have the same exact product, give or take a few key features (like visual programming with Dataiku, cloud/on-prem hosting, etc.). The biggest thing that I've seen that is missing from almost all of them is a robust data ingestion and transformation engine. THAT'S what I'm interested in seeing.

pmarkovics 7y ago

Hi, I’m one of the founders of Nextjournal. I haven’t tried Domino Datalab so I can’t give you a comparison but I can speak to the vision of Nextjournal: We market towards Data Science because our feature set (automatic versioning, reproducibility, collaboration, etc) applies very well to many pain points currently existing in the field. But Nextjournal is not limited to Data Science. We designed it as a general purpose literate programming environment that should be able to address many different use cases: generative art, cloud APIs, spreadsheet-like applications, molecular dynamics simulations, you name it. The way we want to achieve this is by allowing people to extend Nextjournal eventually, by bringing their own languages and by implementing their own components that can be used in a notebook and shared with other users (e.g. a spreadsheet component or a task board component). We are already building some parts of Nextjournal with Nextjournal, like our component for cloning GitHub repositories into a notebook. We think this will eventually make the platform, as a whole, much more understandable and learnable and will give our users much more agency in what they want to accomplish.

kvlr 7y ago

I haven't tried Domino Datalab myself so take this with a grain of salt. While data science is an obvious use case of literate programming, it's not the only one. I see the fundamental problem that needs to be addressed is one of dependency management. We address this today using Docker. In the future we plan to use a more functional approach most likely based on Nix or Guix. This more principled approach should address both reproducibility and usability (by allowing to compose images and providing much better install times thanks to binary caching). I haven't really used Domino Datalab but I'm not sure if they allow for the installation of arbitrary system libraries and packages like we do. Check out some out our machine learning samples which run on GPUs: https://nextjournal.com/collection/machine-learning https://nextjournal.com/collection/machine-learning In the future we also plan to allow in-browser JavaScript execution, this is currently hidden behind a feature flag but we still have an article that uses it in https://nextjournal.com/dubroy/ohm-parsing-made-easy https://nextjournal.com/dubroy/ohm-parsing-made-easy