I’ve been working on an inherited Shiny app at work for the past few months. One of the many frustrating things about Shiny lately has been around buttons. Well, it wasn’t really about buttons, but that’s where it started. I noticed that a number of buttons - some having file inputs, some having text inputs - did not trigger every time, and I expected them to trigger every time no matter what.

library(viridis) # Import the viridis color palette library library(ggplot2) set.seed(123) # Set a seed for reproducibility num_flips <- 50000 flips <- sample(c("Heads", "Tails"), num_flips, replace = TRUE) # Image aspect ratio aspect_ratio <- 1 # You can customize the aspect ratio here n_col <- round(sqrt(num_flips) * aspect_ratio) n_row <- ceiling(num_flips / n_col) # Create a color matrix to represent coin flips colors <-

Now that I’m on the tenure track, I’ve been looking for a way to keep track of my different research projects so I can get them all finished and published. Matt Lebo’s “Managing Your Research Pipeline” presents a neat way of quantifying and tracking the progress of your research, and I recently adopted it for my own stuff. I even made a fancy R Markdown + flexdashboard dashboard to show the status of the pipeline interactively.

Many US federal agencies are now running app competitions to highlight their web services (see here), and hopefully get people to build cool stuff using government data (see Data.gov for more). See here for a nice list of the US government’s web services. One of these agencies was the United States Geological Survey (USGS). They opened up an app competition and [we won best overall app!