R

Setting the scene for automation 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.

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 am developing and my computer froze multiple times.

One of the ways for getting Google Analytics data in R is using the excellent package googleAnalyticsR. GA4 and Big Query But suppose you are curious about trying (the new) GA4 because the old one is going away, and you set it up on your site (like I did on the Discindo blog).

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 basics of DynamoDB.

blast and BlasterJS 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 blast results in a way similar to the typical viz available on NCBI’s website.

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 format for DynamoDB and some wrappers to put these lists as items in the remote NoSQL database.

About {brochure} {shiny}, and the closely linked packages like {bslib}, {thematic}, {shinytest}, etc, are a fantastic resource for R programmers that enable building powerful interactive applications. Building on top of these, are some new (and not so new) R packages that that streamline and standardize the development of {shiny} applications.

R and AWS DynamoDB 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.

In this post we share a useful tidbit we learned while developing the demo for the OpenBudgetMKD application. Like with most projects at Discindo, the OpenBudgetMKD application is based on R and {shiny}.

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 vision are to “… strengthen the awareness and capacity of citizens and civil society …”.