INTERACTIVE DASHBOARDS WITH SHINY
Robert Mitchell | @robertmitchellv
2018-12-10
ABOUT ME
- I work at Skid Row Housing Trust as a data analyst
- (I'll just refer to it as SRHT from now on)
- I have been working in this role for around three years
- I am self taught as a programmer/analyst
- Background in philosophy, comp lit, french, information science
A BIT ABOUT SRHT
- We do three things:
- Develop affordable housing; specifically permanent supportive housing
- Provide supportive services to the residents of our affordable housing projects
- Have an affiliate manage the properties, repairs, et cetera
A BIT ABOUT SRHT
- We believe in the Housing First model
- We believe in Harm Reduction
- This is pretty much industry standard for the most part
WHAT I WANT TO COVER
- UI ➡️ server ➡️ user feedback loop
- The different ways your
shiny app can be interactive
- The different ways your
shiny app can look
- The libraries associated with these efforts
- How you can dip your toe into this kind work if phrases like deploy my application are scary using
flexdashboard instead of shiny
- Briefly touch on the improvements to the
shiny framework, e.g., async and how you can make it scale (things to think about for later)
WHO THIS TALK IS FOR
- People who have been learning R for a little while and are curious about they can put their work online
- You've maybe done a
shiny tutorial before but didn't finish it
***T
WHO THIS TALK IS FOR
- You're eager to learn how some of this works but may not have time to put it to use yet
- You're really just dipping your toe into this and want to get an idea into how it works
WHAT I HOPE FOR YOU AFTER
- It's ok if you walk away from this still not sure how you're going to build your
shiny application–writing code is hard and you should know it takes non-software engineers a while to wrap their minds around things like this
- This is definitely my experience
WHAT I HOPE FOR YOU AFTER
- The confidence to go home, read through some documentation and just try to start putting things together!
- You won't learn until you try!
WHY SHINY?
- You can leverage the work you have already done in R to accomplish something you would normally need to learn JavaScript, Ruby, Python, PHP, or something else to accomplish
- The same way that you would create a visualization for an
rmarkdown report can be repurposed for another medium
- This is especially true of
flexdashboard, which you should always use in the event a shiny application is unnecessarily adding complexity to your work! (we'll talk about this more later)
FEEDBACK LOOP?
- I'm talking about the ways in which your user clicks and explores your dashboard's user interface (UI)
- Which then triggers code in your
server code to run
- Which then returns output back to your input
- So your user can get what they need
