Who is Laika?

Laika, or in original Russian Лайка (pronounced Lie-ka), was a stray dog found roaming the streets of Moscow in the 1950s. She was recruited to become the first creature to orbit the Earth in space. Learn more about this famous Soviet space dog at Wikipedia.

Why Laika?

Dogs are excellent companions and reliable friends, and they're the best at fetching things for humans. This project is named as a tribute to the coolest of all dogs.

Laika logo

Who built Laika?

For more than 10 years, part of Gaelan Lloyd's professional duties have required him to obtain, process, and share analytics data for his organization's websites. The process of manually copy-and-pasting data from Google Analytics intro Microsoft Excel spreadsheets was error-prone and tedious. It was easy for team members to accidentally look at old, outdated Excel files, which caused confusion and misunderstandings.

In early 2016, Gaelan started a hobby project to start eliminating the stress of pulling data from analytics tools by hand. The first tool simply fetched data from Google Analytics, only storing output in flat CSV files. It didn't take long for the potential for something much bigger to develop... And, that's how Laika was born.

How was Laika built?

Laika was built entirely using open source software and operating systems and is built using these phenomenal open source tools for its core functionality: