Discindo

Data are fun!

Data science and data engineering solutions with R and Shiny in the cloud

Happy New Year

R

Just a ggplot2 decorated tree.

r2lambda update to support multi-file projects and renv projects

AWS

R

It has been a while since I’ve had the chance to work on my {r2lambda} project. In particular, there were a couple of good points made by a user on GitHub about…

Noting the differences in deploying R vs Python apps on Posit Connect

R

Python

Automation

I ended my previous post Using uv to manage the environment for a Python Shiny app and setting up a GitHub action to publish it to Posit Connect with:

Using uv to manage the environment for a Python Shiny app and setting up a GitHub action to publish it to Posit Connect

python

automation

A couple of weeks ago, I got a notification from LinkedIn. Unlike the usual notifications, this was not from an anonymous recruiter viewing my profile. It was a post by Russ…

Shiny ducks: connecting to MotherDuck from Shiny

R

In a previous post I wrote about how to connect to MotherDuck from R. However, the process described there, where you click in the browser to authenticate, wouldn’t really…

Few notes on getting R package data from the local library

R

I am involved in a Posit Team deployment, and one of the things that we are looking into is default R packages that should be made available to all users. We are looking to…

Joining the flock from R: working with data on MotherDuck

R

With DuckDB releasing version 1.0.0 on June 3rd, and MotherDuck following with the general availability announcement on June 11th, it is a perfect opportunity to see how…

How to set up development and production environments using AWS Copilot: Example using a `plumber` API.

R

API

plumber

AWS

AWS Copilot

GitHub Actions

In this post I am documenting step-by-step the process of deploying dev/stage/prod environments and instances of a {plumber} API on AWS AppRunner using AWS Copilot. This is…

A simple workflow for async {shiny} with {mirai}

R

Shiny

async programming

mirai

In my previous post, I developed a shiny module to encapsulate the logic of sending and monitoring background async tasks. The main advantage of this approach was to…

A simple workflow for async {shiny} with {callr}

R

Shiny

async programming

callr

In the R/Shiny community we are fortunate to have several approaches for async programming. It is an active field of development with a variety of options depending on the…

100 days of Python and R

R

python

Random things from 100 days of code challenge.

Deploying Plumber API to AWS Elastic Container Service

AWS

Recently, I started a new position where part of my role is to support colleagues in the final steps of getting a data product out of the door. This will, eventually…

How to deploy Shiny application to Digital Ocean using GitHub Actions

R

Shiny

GitHub Actions

Digital Ocean

ShinyProxy

For the remainder of this walkthrough, I’ll assume that a DigitalOcean droplet running ShinyProxy is already set up. The great people at Analythium have made setting up an…

How to use buttons in a Reactable widget for navigation in a Shiny application

R

Shiny

How to render and use buttons in tables is a relatively common task faced by {shiny} developers. Commonly, buttons in tables are used for getting more details about a row of…

How to use Bootstrap 5 popovers in Shiny applications

R

Shiny

Creating custom user interfaces with {shiny} and {bslib} has never been easier. Using {bslib} it is also incredibly simple to choose and switch between versions of the…

Data wrangling tricks from the R4DS slack

R

Every now and then there is a question on the R4DS slack that produces a large number of replies. This case was particularly interesting because the user that had the issue…

How to use custom icons in Rmd reports and Shiny applications

R

Shiny

Creating custom HTML tables with icons can be a great way to display data. In some cases, like when we have a few, heterogeneous data points, it is better than creating…

How to set up an R-based AWS Lambda to write to AWS S3 on a schedule

Use AWS Lambda to save the Tidytuesday dataset to AWS S3 every Wednesday

AWS

R

At the end of this tutorial, we would have created an AWS Lambda function that fetches the most-recent Tidytuesday dataset and writes it into an S3 Bucket every Wednesday.…

Set an R-based AWS Lambda function to run on a schedule

AWS

R

A common use of the AWS Lambda service is to set a function to run on a recurring schedule, e.g. to collect logs, move data, or perform some ETL process. In this post, we’ll…

An R AWS Lambda function to download Tidytuesday datasets

AWS

R

In this exercise, we’ll create an AWS Lambda function that downloads the tidytuesday data set for the most recent Tuesday (or most recent Tuesday from a date of interest).

Test an R-based AWS lambda function locally before deploying to the cloud

AWS

R

Creating AWS Lambda functions from R code can be a powerful way to make our local R code available in the cloud as an on-demand serverless service. In recent weeks I’ve been…

Using {stevedore} to manage docker-based variant-calling pipelines from R

R

Bioinformatics

Encapsulating large and complex software applications or packages in docker images makes sense for many reasons. Not least because of a one-line install protocol (i.e., docke…

Deploy an R script as an AWS Lambda function without leaving the R console

R

AWS

AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that lets us deploy any code as a cloud function without worrying about setting up a compute server (for example like discussed here…

Rstudio in the cloud for those of us with old laptops part 2: automating with terraform

R

In the previous post I wrote about how to spin up a EC2 instance with Rstudio server, so some of the more computational heavy R processing can be moved on AWS infrastructure.

Rstudio in the cloud for those of us with old laptops

R

I use a Thinkpad from 2015 for my day to day work, and you can imagine things are getting slower as time goes by. Recently I had to test some computation in an R package I…

Getting Google Analytics data in R the long way

R

One of the ways for getting Google Analytics data in R is using the excellent package googleAnalyticsR.

Python dashboards after Shiny for Python

Python

After building a demo in Shiny for Python I decided to see how to build a demo dashboard with the other tools available for Python, namely Streamlit and Dash.

Packaging a Python Shiny app

Python

After spending few years writing R Shiny apps with {golem}, the first thing I thought about when writing the Python Shiny demo was is it possible to convert it to a python…

Using Wikidata to draw networks of Politically Exposed Persons #2

python

In the previous post I outlined the approach to query data from Wikidata, and wrangle your way to a result about some relationships between politically exposed persons on…

Using Wikidata to draw networks of Politically Exposed Persons #1

python

Some time ago I was doing a demo for querying Politically Exposed Persons from Wikidata. This was supposed to be a part of a bigger project which didn’t materialize.…

How to invoke an AWS Lambda function with R and paws

R

In recent weeks, I have been trying to learn more about using the {paws} software development kit to interact with Amazon Web Services from R. So far, my focus was on the…

A {shiny} app to wrap BlasterJS and visualize NCBI blast results locally

Shiny

R

I recently learned about a really slick JavaScript component for interactive visualization of NCBI’s blast output. BlasterJS (Website, Paper) makes it possible to visualize b…

Using R and {paws} to populate DynamoDB tables #2

R

paws

aws

dynamodb

In our previous post we covered some basics of using the paws SDK to interact with AWS DynamoDB from R. We wrote a few simple functions to prepare R lists in the appropriate…

Building a multi-session {shiny} application with {brochure}

golem

R

Shiny

{shiny}, and the closely linked packages like {bslib}, {thematic}, {shinytest}, etc, are a fantastic resource for R programmers that enable building powerful interactive…

Using R and {paws} to populate DynamoDB tables

R

In recent weeks we’ve been using AWS services for a few our projects. One of the things that came up was to populate DynamoDB tables with data from R. Of course, we didn’t…

Using {shiny.i18n} with {golem} for server-side translation

Shiny

R

golem

shiny.i18n

internationalizations

In this post we share a useful tidbit we learned while developing the demo for the OpenBudgetMKD application.

OpenBudget: A Shiny app for transparent finances in local government in North Macedonia

R

Shiny

Open data

This week we were excited to take part in (and win!) an Open Data Hackathon organized by the Metamorfosis Foundation, a prominent NGO in North Macedonia whose mission and…

WindsoraiR package for accessing Windsor.ai API from R

R

I recently got acquainted with Windsor.ai – a hub for connecting various sources of marketing data like Facebook ads or Google Analytics. The platform is interesting because…

A guide for reproducible data analysis in Macedonian

R

rskopje

rmd

data analysis

reproducible

workshops

2020 has been a sad and difficult year for many and certainly unusual for all of us. For us at Discindo, the adjustments required by limited mobility and closures were not…

Few things I learned while writing an R package

R

I wanted to learn to write an R package for some time, but I didn’t have an idea what should the package do. Then I saw newscatcher and decided to build an R clone, and newsc…

Asynchronous background execution in Shiny using callr

R

Shiny

When designing Shiny applications we commonly associate asynchronous execution with multiple concurrent running sessions of an application. In such cases, when one user has…

Six months of #rstats workshops in Skopje, and more

R

Python

In August 2019 I sent a tweet asking if there any R enthusiasts in Skopje. The tweet got some attention (8 Retweets, 22 Likes) and encouraged us to have our on September 3rd…

Using GitHub actions with R: Some notes from our #TidyTuesday setup

R

Beginning in September 2019 we started organizing a #TidyTuesday event at the hacklab in Skopje - KIKA. It has been 15 events in 2019, and it’s been great. One of the things…

Basic visual manupulation of phylogenies in R

R

StackOverflow

From time to time I visit Stack Overflow (SO) to look at discussions on R, Shiny, and Tidyverse problems. Being an evolutionary biologist, this lead me to learn R in the…